AN 



•?/ 



ESSAY ON THE EVILS 



POPULAR IGIORANCE. 



BY JOHN FOSTER. 



REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION. 



NEW YORK: 

ROBERT CARTER & BROTHERS 
. No. 285 BROADWAY. 

1853. 



1X75- 



"A Work, which, popular and admired as it con- 
fessedly is, has never met with the thousandth part of 
the attention which it deserves. It appears to me that 
we are now at a crisis in the state of our country, and 
of the world, which renders the reasonings and exhor- 
tations of that eloquent production applicable and ur- 
gent beyond all power of mine to express." 

Dr. J. PYE SMITH. 



JUL 20 A929 

America* University 



I9UJ£ 



ADVERTISEMENT 



If the circumstance of a manner of introduction somewhat 
different from what would be expected in a composition of the 
essay class were worth a very few words of explanation, it 
might be mentioned, that the following production has grown 
out of the topics of a discourse, delivered at a public anni- 
versary meeting in aid of the British and Foreign School 
Society. 

When it was thought, a good while after that occasion, 
that a more extensive use might be made of some of the ob- 
servations, the writing was begun in the form of a Discourse 
addressed to an assembly, and commencing with a sentence 
from the Bible, to serve as a general indication to the subject. 
But after some progress had been made, it became evident 
that anything like a comprehensive view of that subject would 
be incompatible with the proper limits of such a composition. 

In relinquishing, however, the form of a public address, the 
writer thought he might be excused for leaving some traces 
of that character to remain, in both the cast of expression and 
the theological sentiment ; for reverting repeatedly to the 
sentence from Scripture ; and for continuing the use of the 
plural pronoun, so commodious for the modest egotism of 
public discoursers. 

In the general design and course of observations, the essay 
retains the character of the original discourse, which was, in 
accordance to the presumed expectations of a grave assembly, 
an attempt to display the importance of the education of the 
people in reference, mainly, to moral and religious interests. 
There are special relations in which I heir ignorance or culti- 



IV ADVERTISEMENT. 

vation are of great consequence to the welfare of the com- 
munity. Some of these are of indispensable consideration to 
the legislator, and to the political economist. But it is in 
that general and moral view, in which ignorance in the lower 
orders is beheld the cause of their vice, irreligion, and conse- 
quent misery, that the subject is attempted, imperfectly and 
somewhat desultorily, to be illustrated in the following pages. 

Nor was it within the writer's design to suggest any par- 
ticular plans, regulations, or instrumental expedients, in pro- 
motion of the system of operations hopefully begun, for rais- 
ing these classes from their degradation. His part has been 
to make such a prominent representation of the calamitous 
effects of their ignorance, as shall prove it an aggravated 
national guilt to allow another generation to grow up to the 
same condition as the present and the past. In the course 
of attempting this, occasions have been seized of exposing the 
absurdity of those who are hostile to the mental improvement 
of the people. If any one should say that this is a mere beat- 
ing of the air, for that all such hostility is now gone by, he 
may be assured there are many persons, of no insignificant 
rank in society, who would from their own consciousness 
smile at the simplicity with which he can so easily shape 
men's opinions and dispositions to his mind whether they will 
or not. He must have been the most charitable or the most 
obtuse of observers. 

It is feared the readers of the following essay will find some 
defect of distribution and arrangement. To the candor of 
those who are practised in literary work it would be an ad- 
missible plea, that when, in a preparation to meet a particular 
occasion for which but little time has been allowed, a series 
of topics and observations has been hastily sketched out, it is 
far from easy to throw them afterwards into a different order. 
The author has to bespeak indulgence also, here and there, 
to something too like repetition. If he qualifies the terms in 
which this fault is acknowledged, it is because he thinks that, 
though there be a recurrence of similarities, a mere bare ite- 
ration is avoided, by means of a diversity and addition of the 
matter of illustration and enforcement. 

Any benevolent writer on the subject would wish he could 



ADVERTISEMENT. V 

treat it without such frequent use of the phrases, " lower 
orders," " subordinate classes," " inferior portion of society," 
and other expressions of the same kind ; because they have 
an invidious sound, and have indeed very often been used in 
contempt. He can only say, that he uses them with no such 
feeling ; that they are employed simply as the most obvious 
terms of designation ; and that he would like better to employ 
any less ungracious ones that did not require an affected cir- 
cumlocution. 

In several parts of the essay, there will be found a lan- 
guage of emphatic censure on that conduct of states, that pre- 
dominant spirit and system in the administration of the affairs 
of nations, by which the people have been consigned to such 
a deplorable condition of intellectual and consequently moral 
degradation, while resources approaching to immensity have 
been lavished on objects of vanity and ambition. So far from 
feeling that such observations can require any apology, the 
writer thinks it is high time for all the advocates of intellec- 
tual, moral, and religious improvement, to raise a protesting 
voice against that policy of the states denominated Christian, 
and especially our own, which has, through age after age, 
found every conceivable thing necessary to be done, at all 
costs and hazards, rather than to enlighten, reform, and refine 
the people. He thinks that nothing can more strongly betray 
a judgment enslaved, or a time-serving dishonesty, in those 
who would assume to dictate to such an advocate and to 
censure him, than that sort of doctrine which tells him that it 
is beside his business, and out of his sphere, as a Christian 
moralist, to animadvert on the conduct of national authorities, 
when he sees them, during one long period of time after 
another, not doing that which is the most important of all 
things to be done for the people over whom they preside, but 
doing what is in substance and effect the reverse ; and doing 
it on that great scale, which contrasts so fearfully with the 
small one, on which the individuals who deplore such perver- 
sion of power are confined to attempt a remedy of the con- 
sequences. 

This interdiction comes with its worst appearance when it 
is put forth in terms affecting a profound reverence of reli* 
1* 



VI ADVERTISEMENT. 

gion ; a reverence which cannot endure that so holy a thing 
should be defiled, by being brought in any contact with such 
a subject as the disastrous effect of bad government, on the 
intellectual and moral state of the people. The advocate of 
schemes for the improvement of their rational nature may, it 
seems, take his ground, his strongest ground, on religion, for 
enforcing on individuals the duty of promoting such an ob- 
ject. In the name and authority of religion he may press on 
their consciences with respect to the application of their prop- 
erty and influence ; and he may adopt under its sanction a 
strongly judicial language in censure of their negligence, 
their insensibility to their accountableness, and their lavish 
expenditures foreign to the most important uses : in all this 
he does well. But the instant he begins to make the like 
judicial application of its laws to the public conduct of the 
governing authorities, that instant he debases Christianity to 
politics, most likely to party-politics ; and a pious horror is 
affected at the profanation. Christianity is to be honored 
somewhat after the same manner as the Lama of Thibet. It 
is to stay in its temple, to have the proprieties of homage duly 
preserved within its precincts, but to be exempted (in reve- 
rence of its sanctity !) from all cognizance of great public 
affairs, even in the points where they most interfere with or 
involve its interests. It could show, perhaps, in what manner 
the administration of those affairs injures these interests ; but 
it would degrade its sacred character by talking of any such 
matter. But Christianity must have leave to decline the 
sinister compliment of such pretended anxiety to preserve it 
immaculate. As to its sacred character, it can venture that, 
on the strength of its intrinsic quality and of its own guard- 
ianship, while, regardless of the limits thus attempted in mock 
reverence to be prescribed, it steps in a censorial capacity on 
what will be called a political ground, so far as to take ac- 
count of what concern has been shown, or what means have 
been left disposable, for operations to promote the grand es- 
sentials of human welfare, by that public system which has 
grasped and expended the strength of the community. Chris- 
tianity is not so demure a thing that it cannot, without vio- 
lating its consecrated character, go into the exercise of this 



ADVERTISEMENT. Vll 

judicial office. And as to its right to do so, — either it has a 
right to take cognizance now of the manner in which the 
spirit and measures of states and their regulators bear upon 
the most momentous interests, or it will have no right to be 
brought forward as the supreme law for the final award on 
those proceedings and those men.* 

It is now more than twenty years since a national plan of 
education for the inferior classes, was brought forward by 
Mr. (now Lord) Brougham. The announcement of such a 
scheme from such an Author, was received with hope and 
delight by those who had so long deplored the condition of 
those classes. But when it was formally set forth, its ad- 
ministrative organization appeared so defective in liberal com- 
prehension, so invidiously restricted and accommodated to the 
prejudices and demands of one part of the community, that 
another great division, the one in which zeal and exertions 
for the education of the people had been more and longer con- 
spicuous, was constrained to make an instant and general 
protest against it. And at the same time it was understood, 
that the party in whose favor it had been so inequitably con- 
structed, were displeased at even the very small reserve it 
made from their monopoly of jurisdiction. It speedily fell to 
the ground, to the extreme regret of the earnest friends of 
popular reformation that a design of so much original promise 
should have come to nothing. 

All legislative consideration of the subject went into abey- 
ance ; and has so remained, with trifling exception, through 
an interval in which far more than a million, in England alone, 
of the children who were at that time within that stage of 
their life on which chiefly a general scheme would have acted, 
have grown up to animal maturity, destitute of all that can, 
in any decent sense of the word, be called education. Think 

* A censure on this alleged desecration of religious topics, which had 
been pronounced on the Essay (first edit.) by a Review making no small 
pretensions both religious and literary, was the immediate cause that 
prompted these observations. But they were made with a general refer- 
ence to a hypocritical cant much in vogue at that time, and long before. 
That it was hypocritical appeared plainly enough from the circumstance, 
that those solemn rebukes of the profanation of religion, by implicating it 
with political affairs, smote almost exclusively on one side. Let the re- 
ligious moralist, or the preacher, amalgamate religion as largely as he 
pleased with the proper sort of political sentiments, that is, the servile, and 
then it was all right. 



VH1 ADVERTISEMENT. 

of the difference between their state as it is, and what it might 
have been if there had at that time existed patriotism, liberality, 
and moral principle, enough to enact and carry into effect a 
comprehensive measure. The longer the neglect the more 
aggravated the pressure with which the subject returns upon 
us. It is forcing itself on attention with a demand as per- 
emptory as ever was the necessity of an embankment against 
the peril of inundation. There are no indications to make us 
sanguine as to the disposition of the most influential classes ; 
but it were little less than infatuation not to see the necessity 
of some extraordinary proceeding, to establish a fortified line 
between us and — not national dishonor; that is flagrantly 
upon us, but — the destruction of national safety. 

As to national dishonor, by comparison with what may be 
seen elsewhere, it is hardly possible for a. patriot to feel a 
more bitter mortification than in reading the description, as 
recently given by M. Cousin, of the state of education in the 
Prussian dominions, and then looking over the hideous exhi- 
bition of ignorance and barbarism in this country ; in repre- 
senting to himself the vernal intelligence, (as we may rightly 
name it,) the information, the sense of decorum, the fitness 
for rational converse, which must quite inevitably diffuse a 
value and grace throughout the general youthful character 
under such a discipline, and then changing his view to what 
may be seen all over his own country — an incalculable and 
ever-increasing tribe of human creatures, growing up in a 
condition to show what a wretched and offensive thing is 
human nature left to itself. 

When neither opprobrium, nor prospective policy, nor sense 
of duty, can constrain the attention of the officially and virtu- 
ally ruling part of society to an important national interest, 
it is sure to come on them at last in some more alarming and 
imperative manifestation. The present and very recent times 
have afforded significant indication of what an ignorant popu- 
lace are capable of believing, and of being successfully in- 
stigated to perpetrate. It is not to be pretended that such 
ignorance, and such liabilities to mischief, exist only in par- 
ticular spots of the land, as if the local outbreaks were merely 
incidental and insulated facts, standing out of community with 



ADVERTISEMENT. IX 

anything widely pervading the mass. Within but very few 
years of the present date, we have had the spectacle of mil- 
lions, literally millions, of the people of England, yielding an 
absolute credence to the most monstrous delusions respecting 
public questions and measures, imposed on them by dishonest 
artifice, and what may be called moral incendiarism; and 
these delusions of a nature to excite the passions of the multi- 
tude to crime. It is difficult to believe that all this can be seen 
without serious apprehension, by those who sustain the pri- 
mary responsibility for devising measures to secure the na- 
tional safety, (that we may take the lowest term of national 
welfare ;) and that they can be content to rest that security on 
expedients which, in keeping the people in order, make them 
no wiser or better. It would truly be a glorious change in 
our history, if we might at length see the national power 
wielded by enlightened, virtuous, and energetic spirits, not 
only to the bare effect of withstanding disorder and danger, 
but in a resolute, invincible determination to redeem us from 
the national ignominy of exhibiting to the world, far in the 
nineteenth century, a rude, unprincipled, semi-barbarous 
populace. 

Thus far the hopes which had flattered us with such a 
change, as a consequence of a political movement so conside- 
rable as to be denominated a revolution, have been grievously 
disappointed. We must wait, but with prognostics little en- 
couraging, to see whether a professed concern for . popular 
education will result in any effective scheme. That profes- 
sion has hitherto been followed up with so little appearance 
of earnest conviction, or of high and comprehensive purpose, 
among the majority of the influential persons who, perhaps 
for decorum's sake, have made it, as to leave cause for appre- 
hension that, if any such scheme were to be proposed, it would 
be in the first instance very limited in its compass, indecisive 
in its enforcement, and niggardly in its pecuniary appoint- 
ments. Many of our legislators have never thought of in- 
vestigating the condition of the people, and are unaware of 
their deplorable destitution of all mental cultivation ; and many 
have formed but a low and indistinct estimate of the kind and 
measure of cultivation desirable to be imparted. Very slowly 



X ADVERTISEMENT. 

does the conviction or the desire make its way among the 
favorites of fortune, that the portion of humanity so far below 
them should be raised to the highest mental condition com- 
patible with the limitation and duties of their subordinate 
allotment. 

No doubt, the most genuine zeal for the object would find 
difficulties in the way, of a magnitude to require a great and 
persevering exertion of power, were they only those opposed 
by the degraded condition of the people themselves ; by the 
utter carelessness of one part, and the intractableness of 
another. Nor is it to be denied, that the differences of relig- 
ious opinion, among the promoters of the design, must create 
considerable difficulty as to the mode and extent of religious 
instruction, to form a part of a comprehensive system. But 
we are told, besides, of we know not what obstruction to be 
encountered from prejudices of prescription, privileged and 
peculiar interests, the jealous pride of venerable institutions, 
assumed rights of station and rank, punctilios of precedence, 
the tenacity of parties who find their advantage in things as 
they are, and so forth ; all to be deferentially consulted. 

If this mean that the old horror of a bold experimental 
novelty is still to be yielded to ; that nothing in this so urgent 
affair is to be ventured but in a creeping inch-by-inch move- 
ment ; that the reign of gross ignorance, with all its attendant 
vices, is to be allowed a very leisurely retreat, retaining its 
hold on a large portion of the present and following genera- 
tions of the children, and therefore the adults ; that their con- 
dition and fate shall be mainly left at the discretion of igno- 
rant and often worthless parents ; that there shall be no con- 
siderable positive exaction of local provision for the institution, 
or of attendance of those who should be benefited by it ; that, 
in short, there shall not be a comprehensive application of the 
national power through its organ, the government, by author- 
itative, and, we must say, in some degree coercive measures, 
to abate as speedily as possible the national nuisance and 
calamity of such a state of the juvenile faculties and habits 
as we see glaring around us ; and all this because homage is 
demanded to anticipated prejudices, selfishness of privilege, 
venerable institutions, pride of station, jealousy of the well- 



ADVERTISEMENT. XI 

endowed, and the like : — if this be what is meant, we may 
well ask whether these factitious prerogatives, that would 
thus interfere to render feeble, partial, and slow, any pro- 
jected exertion to rescue the nation from barbarism, turpitude, 
and danger, be not themselves among the most noxious things 
in the land, and the most deserving to be extirpated. 

How readily will the proudest descend to the plea of impo- 
tence when the exhortation is to something which they care 
not for or dislike, but to which, at the same time, it would be 
disreputable to avow any other than the most favorable senti- 
ments, to be duly expressed in the form of great regret that 
the thing is impracticable. Impracticable — and does the case 
come at last to be this, that from one cause and another, from 
the arrogance of the high and the untowardness of the low, 
the obstinacy of prejudice, and the rashness of innovation, 
the dissensions among friends of a beneficent design and the 
discountenance of those who are no better than enemies, a 
mighty state, triumphantly boasting of every other kind of 
power, absolutely cannot execute a scheme for rescuing its 
people from being what a great Authority on this subject has 
pronounced " the worst educated nation in Europe ?" Then 
let it submit, with all its pomp, pride, and grandeur, to stand 
in derision and proverb on the face of the earth. 



With a view to a wider circulation than that which is 
limited by the price of the volume published in an expensive 
form and style of printing, it has been deemed advisable to 
publish a cheap edition of the " Essay on Popular Ignorance." 
It is not in any degree an abridgment of the preceding edition ; 
the only omission, of the slightest consequence, being in a 
few places where changes have been rendered necessary by 
the subsequent conduct of our national authorities, as affecting 
our speculations and prospects in relation to general educa- 
tion ', while, on the other hand, there are numerous little ad- 
ditions and corrections, in attempts to bring out the ideas 
more fully, or with some little afterthought of discrimination 
or exception. In some instances the connection and depen- 



Xll ADVERTISEMENT. 

dence of the series of thoughts have been rendered more ob- 
vious, and the sentences reduced to a somewhat more simple 
and compact construction ; but the principal object in this 
final revisal has been literary correction, without any ma- 
terial enlargement or change. 

It is hoped that this reprint in a popular form may serve 
the purpose of contributing something, in co-operation with 
the present exertions, to expose, and partially remedy, the 
lamentable and nationally disgraceful ignorance to which the 
people of our country have been so long abandoned. 



CONTENTS 



SECTION" I. 

Defect of sensibility in the view of the unhappiness of mankind. 
— Ignorance one grand cause of that unhappiness. — Ignorance 
prevalent among the ancient Jewish people. — Its injurious 
operation — and ultimately destructive consequence. — More 
extended consideration of ignorance as the cause of misery 
among the ancient heathens, vl 



SECTION n. 

Brief review of the ignorance prevailing through the ages sub- 
sequent to those of ancient history. — State of the popular 
mind in Christendom during the complete reign of Popery. — 
Supposed reflections of a Protestant in one of our ancient 
splendid structures for ecclesiastical use. — Slow progress of 
the Reformation, in its effects on the understandings of the 
people. — Their barbarous ignorance even in the time of Eliza- 
beth, notwithstanding the intellectual and literary glories of 
this country in that period. — Sunk in ignorance still in what 
has often been called our Augustan age. — Strange insensi- 
bility of the cultivated part of the nation with regard to the 
mental and moral condition of the rest. — Almost heathen igno- 
rance of religion at the time when Whitefield and Wesley began 
to excite the attention of the multitude to that subject. — Signs 
and means of a change for the better in recent times, . 56 



section in. 

Great ignorance and debasement still manifest in various features 
of the popular character. — Entire want, in early life, of any 
2 



XIV CONTENTS. 

idea of a general and comprehensive purpose to be pursued 
— Gratification of the senses the chief good. — Cruelty a subsid- 
iary resource. — Disposition to cruelty displayed and confirmed 
by common practices. — Confirmed especially by the manner of 
slaughtering animals destined for food. — Displayed in the 
abuse of the laboring animals. — General characteristic of the 
people an indistinct and faint sense of right and wrong. — Va- 
rious exemplifications. — Dishonor to our country that the 
people should have remained in such a condition. — Effects of 
their ignorance as appearing in several parts of the economy 
of life ; in their ordinary occupations ; in their manner of spend- 
ing their leisure time, including the Sunday ; in the state of 
domestic society ; consequences of this last as seen in the old 
age of parents. — The lower classes placed by their want of 
education out of amicable communication with the higher. — 
Unhappy and dangerous consequences of this. — Great decline 
of the respect which in former times the people felt toward 
the higher classes and the existing order of the community. — 
of a contrary spirit, 106 



SECTION IV. 

Objection, that a material increase of knowledge and intelligence 
among the people would render them unfit for their station, 
and discontented with it ; would excite them to insubordina- 
tion and arrogance toward their superiors ; and make them 
the more liable to be seduced by the wild notions and perni- 
cious machinations of declaimers, schemers, and innovators. — 
Observations in answer. — Special and striking absurdity of 
this objection in one important particular. — Evidence from 
matter of fact that the improvement of the popular under- 
standing has not the tendency alleged. — The special regard 
meant to be had to religious instruction in the education de- 
sired for the lower classes, a security against their increased 
knowledge being perverted into an excitement to insubordi- 
nation and disorder. — Absurdity of the notion that an improved 
education of the common people ought to consist of instruction 
specifically and almost solely religious. — The diminutive quan- 
tity of religious as well as other knowledge to which the 
people would be limited by some zealous advocates of order 
and subordination utterly inadequate to secure those objects. 
— But, question what is to be understood by order and subor- 
dination. — Increased knowledge and sense in the people cer- 
tainly not favorable to a credulous confidence and a passive, 
unconditional submission, on their part, toward the presiding 
classes in the community. — Advantage, to a wise and upright 



CONTENTS. XV 

government, of having intelligent subjects. — Great effect which 
a general improvement among the people would necessarily 
have on the manner of their being governed. — The people ar- 
rived, in this age, at a state which renders it impracticable to 
preserve national tranquillity without improving then - minds 
and making some concession to their claims. — Folly and prob- 
able calamity of an obstinate resolution to maintain subordina- 
tion in the nations of Europe in the arbitrary and despotic 
manner of former times. — Facility and certain success of a 
better system, 170 



SECTION V. 

Extreme poverty of religious knowledge among the uneducated 
people : their notions respecting G-od, Providence, Jesus Christ, 
the invisible world. — Fatal effect of their want of mental dis- 
cipline as causing an inaptitude to receive religious information. 
— Exemplifications, — in a supposed experiment of religious in- 
struction in a friendly visit to a numerous uneducated family ; 
in the stupidity and thoughtlessness often betrayed in attend- 
ance on public religious services; in the impossibility of im- 
parting religious truths, with any degree of clearness, to igno- 
rant persons, when alarmed into some serious concern by sick- 
ness; in the insensibility and invincible delusion sometimes 
retained in the near approach to death. — Rare instances of the 
admirable efficacy of religion to animate and enlarge the fac- 
ulties, even in the old age of an ignorant man. — Excuses for the 
intellectual inaptitude and perversion of uncultivated religious 
minds. — Animadversions on religious teachers, . . 205 



SECTION VI. 

Supposed method of verifying the preceding representation of 
the ignorance of the people. — Renewed expressions of wonder 
and mortification that this should be the true description of the 
English nation. — Prodigious exertions of this nation for the ac- 
complishment of objects foreign to the improvement of the 
people. — Effects which might have resulted from far less exer- 
tion and resources applied to that object. — The contrast be- 
tween what has been done, and what might have been done 
by the exertion of the national strength, exposed in a series of 
parallel representations. — Total unconcern, till a recent period, 
of the generality of persons in the higher classes respecting the 



XVI CONTENTS. 

mental state of the populace. — Indications of an important 
change in the manner of estimating them. — Measures attempted 
and projected for their improvement. — Some of these measures 
and methods insignificant in the esteem of projectors of merely 
political schemes for the amendment of the popular condition. 
— But questions to those projectors on the efficacy of such 
schemes. — Most desirable, nevertheless, that the political sys- 
tems and the governing powers of states could be converted to 
promote so grand a purpose. — But expostulations addressed to 
those who, desponding of this aid, despond therefore of the 
object itself. — Incitement to individual exertion.- — Reference to 
the sublimest Example. — Imputation of extravagant hope. — 
Repelled ; first, by a full acknowledgment how much the hopes 
of sober-minded projectors of improvement are limited by what 
they see of the disorder in the essential constitution of our 
nature ; and next, by a plain statement, in a series of particu- 
lars, of what they nevertheless judge it rational to expect from 
a general extension of good education. — Answer to the ques- 
tion, whether it be presumed that any merely human disci- 
pline can reduce its subjects under the predominance of re- 
ligion. — Answer to the inquiry, what is the extent of the know- 
ledge of which it is desired to put the common people in pos- 
session. — Observations on supposed degrees of possible ad- 
vancement of the knowledge and welfare of the community ; 
with reflections of astonishment and regret at the actual state 
of ignorance, degradation, and wretchedness, after so many 
thousand years have passed away. — Congratulatory notice of 
those worthy individuals who have been rescued from the 
consequences of a neglected education by their own resolute 
mental exertions 237 



ESSAY ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 



"my people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. 

Hosea. 



SECTION I. 

It may excite in us some sense of wonder, and per- 
haps of self-reproach, to reflect with what a stillness 
and indifference of the mind we can hear and repeat 
sentences asserting facts which are awful calamities. 
And this indifference is more than the accidental and 
transient state, which might prevail at seasons of pe- 
culiar heaviness or languor. The self-inspector will 
often be compelled to acknowledge it as a symptom 
and exemplification of the habit of his mind, that ideas 
of extensive misery and destruction, though expressed 
in the plainest, strongest language, seem to come with 
but a faint glimmer on his apprehension, and die away 
without awakening one emotion of that sensibility 
which so many comparatively trifling causes can bring 
into exercise. 

Will the hearers of the sentence just now repeated 
from the sacred book, give a moment's attention to the 
effect it has on them ? We might suppose them ac- 
costed with the question, Would you find it difficult to 



18 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

say what idea, or whether anything distinct enough to 
deserve the name of an idea, has been impressed by 
the sound of words bearing so melancholy a significance ? 
And would you have to confess, that they excite no 
interest which would not instantly give place to that of 
the smallest of your own concerns, occurring to your 
thoughts ; or would not leave free the tendency to 
wander loose among casual fancies ; or would not yield 
to feelings of the ludicrous, at the sight of any whim- 
sical incident ? It would not probably be unfair to 
suspect such faintness of apprehension, and such un- 
fixedness and indifference of thought, in the majority 
of any large number of persons, though drawn together 
ostensibly to attend to matters of gravest concern. 
And perhaps many of the most serious of them would 
acknowledge it requires great and repeated efforts, to 
bring themselves to such a contemplative realization 
of an important subject, that it shall lay hold on 
the affections, though it should press on them, as in 
the present instance, with facts and reflections of a 
nature the most strongly appealing to a mournful sen- 
sibility. 

That the " people are destroyed," is perceived to 
have the sound of a lamentable declaration. But its 
import loses all force of significance in falling on a state 
of feeling which, if resolvable into distinct sentiments, 
would be expressed to some such effect as this : — that 
the people's destruction, in whatever sense of the word, 
is, doubtless, a deplorable thing, but quite a customary 
and ordinary matter, the prevailing fact, indeed, in the 
general state of this world ; that, in truth, it would 
seem as if they were made but to be destroyed, for 
that they have constantly been, in all imaginable ways, 
the subjects of destruction ; that, subjected in com- 
mon with all living corporeal beings to the doom of 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 19 

death, and to a fearful diversity of causes tending to 
inflict it, they have also appeared, through their long 
sad history, consigned to a spiritual and moral destruc- 
tion, if that term be applicable to a condition the re- 
verse of wisdom, goodness, and happiness ; that, in 
short, such a sentence as that cited from the prophet, 
is too merely an expression of what has been always 
and over the whole world self-evident, to excite any 
particular attention or emotion. 

Thus the destruction, in every sense of the word, of 
human creatures, is so constantly obvious, as mingled 
and spread throughout the whole system, that the mind 
has been insensibly wrought to that protective obtuse- 
ness which (like the thickness of the natural clothing 
of animals in rigorous climates) we acquire in defence 
of our own ease, against the aggrievance of things which 
inevitably continue in our presence. An instinctive 
policy to avoid feeling with respect to this prevailing 
destruction, has so effectually taught us how to maintain 
the exemption, by all the requisite sleights of overlook- 
ing, diverting, forgetting, and admitting deceptive 
maxims of palliation, that the art or habit is become 
almost mechanical. When fully matured, it appears 
like a wonderful adventitious faculty — a power of evad- 
ing the sight, of not seeing, what is obviously and glar- 
ingly presented to view on all sides. There is, indeed, 
a dim general recognition that such things are ; the 
hearing of a bold denial of their existence, would give 
an instant sense of absurdity, which would provoke a 
pointed attention to them, the more perfectly to verify 
their reality ; and the perception how real and dread- 
ful they are, might continue distinct as long as we 
were in the spirit of contradicting and exploding that 
absurd denial ; but, in the ordinary state of feeling, 
the mind preserves an easy dulness of apprehension 
2* 



20 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

toward the melancholy vision, and sees it as if it saw 
it not. 

This fortified insensibility may, indeed, be sometimes 
broken in upon with violence, by the sudden occurrence 
of some particular instance of human destruction, in 
either import of the word, some example of peculiar 
aggravation, or happening under extraordinary and 
striking circumstances, or very near us in place or 
interest. An emotion is excited of pity, or terror, or 
horror ; so strong, that if the person so affected has 
been habitually thoughtless, and has no wish to be 
otherwise, he fears he shall never recover his state of 
careless ease ; or, if of a more serious disposition, thinks 
it impossible he can ever cease to feel an awful and 
salutary effect. This more serious person perhaps also 
thinks it must be inevitable that henceforward his feel- 
ings will be more alive to the miseries of mankind. But 
how obstinate is an inveterate habitual state of the 
mind against any single impressions made in contraven- 
tion to it! Both the thoughtless and the more reflec- 
tive man may probably find, that a comparatively short 
lapse of time suffices, to relieve them from anything 
more than slight momentary reminiscences of what 
had struck them with such painful force, and to restore, 
in regard to the general view of the acknowledged 
misery of the human race, nearly the accustomed 
tranquillity. The course of feeling resembles a listless 
stream of water, which, after being dashed into commo- 
tion, by a massive substance flung into it, or by its 
precipitation at a rapid, relapses, in the progress of a 
few fathoms and a few moments, into its former slug- 
gishness of current. 

But is it well that this should be the state of feeling, 
in the immediate presence of the spectacle exhibiting 
the people under a process of being destroyed ? There 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 21 

must be a great and criminal perversion from what our 
nature ought to be, in a tranquillity to which it makes 
no material difference whether they be destroyed or 
saved ; a tranquillity which would hardly, perhaps, have 
been awaked to an effort of intercession at the por- 
tentous sign of destruction revealed to the sight of Or- 
nan ; or which might at the deluge have permitted the 
privileged patriarch to sink in a soft slumber, at the 
moment when the ark was felt to be moving from its 
ground. If the original rectitude of that nature had 
been retained by any individual, he would be confounded 
to conceive how creatures having their lot cast in one 
place, so near together, so much alike, and under such 
a complication of connections and dependences, can 
yet really be so insulated, as that some of them may 
behold, with immovable composure, innumerable com- 
panies of the rest in such a condition, that it had been 
better for them not to have existed. 

To such a condition a vast multitude have been con- 
signed by " the lack of knowledge." And we have to 
appeal concerning them to whatever there is of benev- 
olence and conscience, in those who deem themselves 
happy instances of exemption from this deplorable 
consignment ; and are conscious that their state of in- 
estimable privilege is the result, under the blessing of 
heaven, of the reception of information, of truth, into 
their minds. 

If it were suggested to the well instructed in our 
companies to take an account of the benefit they have 
received through the medium of knowledge, they would 
say they do not know where to begin the long enume- 
ration, or how to bring into one estimate so ample a 
diversity of good. It might be something like trying 
to specify, in brief terms, what a highly improved por- 
tion of the ground, in a tract rude and sterile if left to 



22 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

itself, has received from cultivation ; an attempt which 
would carry back the imagination through a progression 
of states and appearances, in which the now fertile 
spots, and picture-like scenes, and commodious passes, 
and pleasant habitations, may or must have existed in 
the advance from the original rudeness. The estimate 
of what has ultimately been effected, rises at each stage 
in this retrospect of the progress, in which so many 
valuable changes and additions still require to be fol- 
lowed by something more, to complete the scheme of 
improvement. In thus tracing backward the condition 
of a now fair and productive place of human dwelling 
and subsistence, it may easily be recollected, what a 
vast number of the earth's inhabitants there are whose 
places of dwelling are in all those states of worse cul- 
tivation and commodiousness, and what multitudes 
leading a miserable and precarious life amidst the in- 
hospitableness of the waste, howling wilderness. Each 
presented circumstance of fertility or shelter, salubrity 
or beauty, may be named as what is wanting to a much 
greater number of the occupants of the world, than 
those to whom the "lines are fallen in such pleasant 
places." 

When, in like manner, a person richly possessed of 
the benefits imparted by means of knowledge, finds, in 
attempting to recount them, that they rise so fast on 
his view, in their variety, combinations, and gradations 
from less to greater, as to overpower his computing 
faculty, he may be reminded that this account of his 
wealth is, in truth, that of many other men's poverty. 
And if, while these benefits are coming so numerously 
in his sight, like an irregular crowd of loaded fruit- 
trees, one partially seen behind the offered luxury of 
another, and others still descried, through intervals, in 
the distance, he can imagine them all devastated and 



ON POrULAR IGNORANCE. 23 

swept away from him, leaving him in a scene of mental 
desolation, — and if he shall then consider that nearly- 
such is the state of the great multitude, — he will surely 
feel that a deep compassion is due to so depressed a 
condition of existence. And how strongly is its infeli- 
city shown by the very circumstance, that a being who 
is himself but very imperfectly enlightened, and who is 
exposed to sorrow and doomed to death, is nevertheless 
in a state to be able to look down upon the victims of 
the "lack of knowledge" with profound commisera- 
tion. The degree of pity is the measure of a conscious 
superiority. 

We may say to persons so favored, — If knowledge 
has been made the cause that you are, beyond all 
comparison, better qualified to make the short sojourn 
on this earth to the greatest advantage, think what a 
fatal thing that must be which condemns so many, 
whose lot is contemporary and in vicinity with yours, 
to pass through the most precious possibilities of good 
un profited, and at last to look back on life as a lost 
adventure. If through knowledge you have been in- 
troduced into a new and superior world of ideas and 
realities, and your intellectual being has there been 
brought into exercise among the highest interests, and 
into communication with the noblest objects, think of 
that condition of the soul to which this better economy 
has no existence. If knowledge rendered efficacious 
has become, in your minds, the light and joy of the 
Christian faith and hope, look at the state of those, 
whose minds have never been cultivated to an ability 
to entertain the principles of religious truth, even as 
mere intellectual notions. You would not for the 
wealth of an empire consent to descend, were it pos- 
sible, from the comparative elevation to which you 



24 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

have been raised by means of knowledge, into the 
melancholy region of spirits abandoned to ignorance. 

But in this situation have the mass of the people 
been, from the time of the prophet whose words we 
have cited, down to this hour. 

The prophets had their exalted privilege of dwell- 
ing amidst the illuminations of heaven effectually coun- 
tervailed, as to any elation of feeling it might have 
imparted, by the grief of beholding the daily spec- 
tacle of the grossest manifestations and mischiefs of 
ignorance among the people, for the very purpose of 
whose exemption from that ignorance it was that they 
bore the sacred office. One of the most striking of 
the characteristics by which their writings so forcibly 
seize the imagination is, a strange continual fluctuation 
and strife of lustre and gloom, produced by the inter- 
mingling and contrast of the emanations from the Spirit 
of infinite wisdom with those proceeding from the dark, 
debased souls of the people. We are tempted to pro- 
nounce that nation not only the most perverse, but the 
most unintelligent and stupid of all human tribes. The 
revealed law of God in the midst of them ; the prophets 
and other organs of oracular communication ; religious 
ordinances and emblems ; facts, made and expressly 
intended to embody truths, in long and various series ; 
the whole system of their superhuman government, 
constituted as a school — all these were ineffectual to 
create so much just thought in their minds, as to save 
them from the vainest and the vilest delusions and 
superstitions. 

But, indeed, this very circumstance, that knowledge 
shone on them from Him who knows all things, may 
in part account for an intellectual perverseness that 
appears so peculiar and marvellous. The nature of 
man is in such a moral condition, that anything is the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 25 

less acceptable for coming directly from God ; it being 
quite consistent, that the state of mind which is de- 
clared to be " enmity against him," should have a dis- 
like to his coming so near, as to impart his communi- 
cations by his immediate act, bearing on them the fresh 
and sacred impression of his hand. The supplies for 
man's temporal being are conveyed to him through 
an extended medium, through a long process of nature 
and art, which seems to place the great First Cause at 
a commodious distance ; and those gifts are, on that 
account, more welcome, on the whole, than if they were 
sent as the manna to the Israelites. The manna itself 
might not have been so soon loathed, had it been pro- 
duced in what we call the regular course of nature. 
And with respect to the intellectual communications 
which were given to constitute the light of knowledge 
in their souls, there can, on the same principle, be 
no doubt that the people would more willingly have 
opened their minds to receive them and exercise the 
thinking faculties bn them, if they could have appeared 
as something originating in human wisdom, or at least 
as something which, though primarily from a divine 
origin, had been long surrendered by the Revealer, to 
maintain itself in the world by the authority of reason 
only, like the doctrines worked out from mere human 
speculation. But truth that was declared to them, and 
inculcated on them, through a continual immediate 
manifestation of the Sovereign Intelligence, had a glow 
of Divinity (if we may so express it) that was unspeak- 
ably offensive to their minds, which therefore receded 
with instinctive recoil. They were averse to look to- 
ward that which they could not see without seeing 
God ; and thus they were hardened in ignorance, 
through a reaction of human depravity against the too 



26 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

luminous approach of the Divine presence to give them 
wisdom. 

But in whatever degree the case might be thus, as 
to the cause, the fact is evident, that the Jewish people 
were not more remarkable for their pre-eminence in 
privilege, than for their grossness of mental vision 
under a dispensation specially and miraculously con- 
stituted and administered to enlighten them. The 
sacred history of which they are the subject, exhibits 
every mode in which the intelligent faculties may evade 
or frustrate the truth presented to them ; every way in 
which the decided preference for darkness may avail 
to defy what might have been presumed to be irresis- 
tible irradiations ; every perversity of will which ren- 
ders men as accountable and criminal for being ignorant 
as for acting against knowledge ; and every form of 
practical mischief in which the natural tendency of 
ignorance, especially wilful ignorance, is shown. A 
great part of what the devout teachers of that people 
had to address to them, wherever they appeared among 
them, was in reproach of their ignorance, and in order, if 
possible, to dispel it. And were we to indulge our fancy 
in picturing the forms and circumstances in which it 
was encountered by those teachers, we might be sure 
of not erring much by figuring situations very similar 
to what might occur in much later and nearer states of 
society. If we should imagine one of these good and 
wise instructors going into a promiscuous company of 
the people, and asking them, with a view at once to see 
into their minds and inform them, say, ten plain ques- 
tions, relative to matters somewhat above the ordinary 
secular concerns of life, but essential for them to under- 
stand, it would be a quite probable supposition that 
he did not obtain from the whole company rational 
answers to more than three, or two, or even one, of 



ON POIULAR IGNORANCE. 27 

those questions; notwithstanding that every one of 
them might be designedly so framed, as to admit of an 
easy reply from the most prominent of the dictates of 
the " law and the prophets," and from the right appli- 
cation of the memorable facts in the national history of 
the Jews. In his earlier experiments he might be 
supposed very reluctant to admit the fact, that so many 
of his countrymen, in one spot, could have been so faith- 
fully maintaining the ascendency of darkness in their 
spirits, while surrounded by divine manifestations of 
truth. He might be willing to suspect he had not been 
happy in the form of words in which his queries had 
been conveyed. But it may be believed that all his 
changes and adaptations of expression, to elicit from 
the contents of his auditors' understandings something 
fairly answering to his questions, might but complete 
the proof that the thing sought was not there. And 
while he might be looking from one to another, with 
regret not unmingled with indignation at an ignorance 
at once so unhappy and so criminal, they probably 
might little care, excepting some slight feeling of mor- 
tified pride, that they were thus proved to be nearly 
pagans in knowledge within the immediate hearing of 
the oracles of God. 

Or we may represent to ourselves this benevolent 
promoter of improvement endeavoring to instruct such 
a company, not in the way of interrogation, but in the 
ordinary manner of discourse, and assuming that they 
actually had in their minds those principles, those points 
of knowledge, which would, on the former supposition 
of a course of questions, have qualified them to make 
the proper replies. It may indeed be too much to 
imagine a discerning man to entertain such a presump- 
tion ; but supposing he did, and proceeded upon it, you 
can well conceive what reception the reasonings, 



28 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

advices, or reproofs, would find among the hearers, 
according to their respective temperaments. Some 
would be content with knowing nothing at all about 
the matter, which they would perhaps say, might be, 
for aught they knew, something very wise ; and, ac- 
cording to their greater or less degree of patience and 
sense of decorum, would wait in quiet and perhaps 
sleepy dulness for the end of the irksome lecture, or 
escape from it by a stolen retreat, or a bold-faced exit. 
To others it would all seem ridiculous absurdity, and 
they would readily laugh if any one would begin. A 
few, possessed of some natural shrewdness, would set 
themselves to catch at something for exception, with 
unadroit aim, but with good will for cavil. While 
perhaps one or two, of better disposition, imperfectly 
descrying at moments something true and important in 
what was said, and convinced of the friendly intention 
of the speaker, might feel a transient regret for what 
they would with honest shame call the stupidity of 
their own minds, accompanied with some resentment 
against those to whose neglect it was greatly attrib- 
utable. The instructor also, as the signs grew evident 
to him of the frustration of his efforts upon the invin- 
cible grossness of the subjects before him, would become 
animated with indignation at the incompetence or 
wicked neglect in the system and office of public in- 
struction, of which the intellectual condition of such a 
company of persons might be taken as a proof and 
consequence. And in fact there is no class more 
conspicuous in reprobation, in the solemn invectives of 
the prophets, than those whose special and neglected 
duty it was to instruct the Jewish people. 

Now if such were the state of their intelligence, how 
would this friend of truth and the people find, how 
would he have expected to find, their piety, their morals, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 29 

and their happiness affected by such destitution of 
knowledge ? Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs 
of thistles ? We are supposing them to be in ignorance 
of four parts out of five, or perhaps of nine parts out 
of ten, of what the Supreme Wisdom was maintaining 
an extraordinary dispensation to declare to them. Why 
to declare, but because each particular in this divine 
promulgation was pointed to some circumstance, some 
propensity, some temptation, in their nature and condi- 
tion, and was exactly fitted to be there applied as a 
rectifier and guard ? The revelations and signs from 
heaven were the sum of what the Perfect Intelligence 
judged indispensable to be sent forth from him to his 
subjects, as seen by him liable to be wrong ; and could 
there be one dictate or fact superfluous in such a com- 
munication? If not, consider the case of minds in 
which one, and a second, and the far greater number, 
of the points of information thus demonstrated to be 
necessary, had no place to shine or exist ; of which 
minds, therefore, the estimates, passions, volitions, 
principles of action with the actions also, were in so 
many instances abandoned to take their chance for good 
or evil. But had they any chance for good in such an 
abandonment? What principle in their nature was 
to determine them to good, with an impulse that rendered 
needless the rational discrimination of it by the light of 
truth ? It were an exceedingly probable thing truly, 
that some happy instinct, or some guiding star of good 
fortune, should have beguiled into an unknowing choice 
of what is right, that very nature which knowledge 
itself, including a recognition of the will of God, is so 
often insufficient to constrain to such a choice. 

But further ; the absence of knowledge is sure to be 
something more and worse than simple ignorance. 
Even were that absence but a mere negation, a vacan- 



'30 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

cy of truth, (the terms truth and knowledge may be 
used for our present purpose as nearly synonymous, for 
what is not truth is not knowledge,) it would be by its 
effect as a deficiency, incalculably injurious. But it 
could not remain a mere deficiency : the vacancy of 
truth would commonly be found replenished with posi- 
tive error. Not indeed replenished, (we are speaking 
of uncultivated persons,) with a comprehensive and ar- 
ranged set of false notions ; for there would not be 
thinking enough to form opinions in any sufficient num- 
ber to be distinctly and specifically the opposites to the 
many truths that were absent ; but a few false notions, 
such as could hardly fail to take the place of absent 
truth in the ignorant mind, however crude they might 
be, and however deficient for constituting a full system 
of error, would be sure to dilate themselves so as to 
have an operation at all the points where truth was want- 
ing. It is frightful to see what a space in an ignorant 
mind one false notion can occupy, working nearly the 
same effect in many distinct particulars, as if there had 
been so many distinct wrong principles, each producing 
specifically its own bad effect. So that in that mind a 
few false notions, and those the ones most likely to es- 
tablish themselves there, shall be virtually equivalent 
to a whole scheme of errors standing formally in place 
of so many truths of which they are the reverse. And 
thus the dark void of ignorance, instead of remaining 
a mere negation, becomes filled with agents of perver- 
sion and destruction ; as sometimes the gloomy apart- 
ments of a deserted mansion have become a den of 
robbers and murderers. 

Such a friend of the people, then, as we were sup- 
posing to expend his life and zeal on the object of res- 
cuing them from their ignorance, would see in that 
ignorance not only the privation of all direction and 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 31 

impulsion to good, but a great positive force of deter- 
mination toward evil. 

But it may be alleged, that he would not find them 
wholly destitute of right information. True ; but he 
would find that the small portion of knowledge which 
an ignorant people did really possess, could be of little 
avail. It is not only that, from the narrowness of its 
scope, knowledge so scanty as to afford no principles 
directly adapted for application to a vast number of 
matters of judgment and conduct, would of course be 
of small use, though it were efficient as far as it reached ; 
— of small use though it did produce that very limited 
quantity of good which ought to be its proper share, in 
a due proportion to the larger amount of good to be 
produced by a larger knowledge. This is not the 
whole of the misfortune ; it would not produce that 
proportionate share. For the fewer are the points to 
which there is knowledge that can be applied, the less 
availing is its application even to those few points. It 
shall be the kind of knowledge apposite to them, and 
yet be nearly useless ; from the obvious cause, that a 
few just notions existing disconnected and confused 
among the mass of vain and false ones, which will, like 
noxious weeds, infest minds left in ignorance, are not 
permitted by those bad associates to do their duty. 
Weak by being few, insulated, unsupported, and dwel- 
ling among vicious neighbors, they not only cannot 
perform their own due service, but are liable to be se- 
duced to that of the evil principles whose company 
they are condemned to keep. The conjunction of truths 
is of the utmost importance for preserving the genuine 
tendency, and securing the appropriate efficacy, of each. 
It is an unhappy "lack of knowledge" when there is 
not enough to preserve, to what there is of it, the hon- 
est beneficial quality of knowledge. How many of the 



32 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

follies, excesses, and crimes, in the course of the world, 
have taken their pretended warrant from some fragment 
of truth, dissevered from the connection of truths indis- 
pensable to its right operation, and in that detached 
state easily perverted into coalescence with the most 
pernicious principles, which concealed and gave effect 
to their malignity under the falsified authority of a 
truth. 

There were many and melancholy exemplifications 
of all we have said of ignorance, in the conduct of that 
ancient people at present in our view. Doubtless a sad 
proportion of the iniquities which, by their necessary 
tendency and by the divine vindictive appointment, 
brought plagues and destruction upon them, were com- 
mitted in violation of what they knew. But also it 
was in no small part from blindness to the manifestation 
of truth and duty incessantly confronting them, that 
they were betrayed into crimes and consequent miseries. 
This is evident equally from the language in which 
their prophets reproached their intellectual stupidity, 
and from the surprise which they sometimes seem to 
have felt on finding themselves involved in retributive 
suffering, for what they could not conceive to be seri- 
ous delinquencies. It appeared as if they had never 
so much as dreamed of such a consequence ; and their 
monitors had to represent to them, that it had been 
through their thoughtlessness of divine dictates and 
warnings, if they did not know that such proceedings 
must provoke such an infliction. 

How one portion of knowledge admitted, with the 
exclusion of other truths equally indispensable to be 
known, may not only be unavailing, but may in effect 
lend force to destructive error, is dreadfully illustrated 
in the final catastrophe of that favored guilty nation. 
They were in possession of the one important point 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 33 

of knowledge, that a Messiah was to come. They held 
this assurance not slightly, but with strong conviction, 
and as a matter of the utmost interest. But then, that 
this knowledge might have its appropriate and happy 
effect, it was of essential necessity for them to know 
also the character of this Messiah, and the real nature 
of his great design. But this they closed up their un- 
derstandings in a fatal contentment not to know. Lit- 
erally the whole people, with a diminutive exception, 
had failed, or rather refused, to admit, as to that part 
of the subject, the inspired declarations. 

Now comes the consequence of knowing only one 
thing of several that require to be inseparable in knowl- 
edge. They formed to themselves a false idea of the 
Messiah, according to their own worldly imaginations ; 
and they extended the full assurance which they justly 
entertained of his coming, to this false notion of what 
he was to be and to accomplish when he should come. 
From this it was natural and inevitable that when the 
true Messiah should come they would not recognize 
him, and that their hostility would be excited against a 
person who, while demanding to be acknowledged in 
that capacity, appeared without the characteristics 
pictured in their vain imagination, and with directly 
opposite ones. And thus they were placed in an in- 
comparably worse situation for receiving him with honor 
when he did appear, than if they had had no knowledge 
that a Messiah was to come. For on that supposition 
they might have regarded him as a most striking phe- 
nomenon, with curiosity and admiration, with awe of 
his miraculous powers, and as little prejudice as it is 
possible in any case for depravity and ignorance to feel 
toward sanctity and wisdom. But this delusive pre-oc- 
cupation of their minds formed a direct grand cause for 
their rejecting Jesus Christ. And how fearful was the 



34 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

final consequence of this " lack of knowledge !" How 
truly, in all senses, the people were destroyed ! The 
violent extermination at length of multitudes of them 
from the earth, was but as the omen and commence- 
ment of a deeper perdition. And the terrible memo- 
rial is a perpetual admonition what a curse it is not to 
Jcnow. For He, by the rejection of whom these de- 
spisers devoted themselves to perish, while he looked 
on their great city, and wept at the doom which he be- 
held impending, said, If thou hadst known, even thou 
in this thy day. 

So much for that selected people : — we may cast a 
glance over the rest of the ancient world, as exempli- 
fying the pernicious effect of the want of knowledge. 

The ignorance which pervaded the heathen nations, 
was fully equal to the utmost result that could have 
been calculated from all the causes contributing to 
thicken the mental darkness. The traditional glimmer- 
ing of that knowledge which had been originally re- 
ceived by divine communication, had long since become 
nearly extinct, having gone out in the act, as it were, 
of lighting up certain fantastic inventions of doctrine, 
by ignition of an element exhaled from the corruptions 
of the human soul. In other words, the primary 
truths, imparted by the Creator to the early inhab- 
itants of the earth, gradually losing their clearness and 
purity, had passed, by a transition through some delu- 
sive analogies, into the vanities of fancy and notion 
which sprang from the inventive depravity of man ; 
which inventions carried somewhat of an authority 
stolen from the grand truths they had superseded. 
And thus, if we except so much instruction as we may 
conceive that the extraordinary and sometimes dreadful 
interpositions of the Governor of the world might con- 
vey, unaccompanied with declarations in language, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 35 

(and it was in but an extremely limited degree that 
these had actually the effect of illumination,) the hu- 
man tribes were surrendered to their own understand- 
ing for all that they were to know and think. Melan- 
choly predicament ! The understanding, the intellect, 
the reason, which had not sufficed for preserving the 
true light from heaven, was to be competent to give 
light in its absence. Under the disadvantage of this 
loss — after the setting of the sun — it was to exercise 
itself on an unlimited diversity of important things, 
inquiring, comparing, and deciding. All those things, 
if examined far, extended into mystery. All genuine 
thinking was a hard repellent labor. Casual impres- 
sions had a mighty force of perversion. The senses 
were not a medium through which the intellect could 
receive ideas foreign to material existence. The appe- 
tites and passions would infallibly occupy and actuate 
the whole man. When by these his imagination was 
put in activity, its gleams and meteors would be any- 
thing rather than lights of truth. His interest, accord- 
ing to his gross apprehension of it, would in number- 
less instances require, and therefore would gain, false 
judgments for justification of the wrong manner of pur- 
suing that interest. And all this while, there was no 
grand standard and test to which the notions of things 
could be brought. If there were some spirits of larger 
and purer thought, that went out in the honest search 
of truth, they must have felt an oppression of utter 
hopelessness in looking round on a world of doubtful 
things, on no one of which they could obtain the dic- 
tate of a supreme intelligence. There was no sovereign 
demonstrator in communication with the earth, to tell 
benighted man what to think in any of a thousand 
questions which arose to confound him. There were, 
instead, impostors, magicians, vain theorists, prompted 



36 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE, 

by ambition and superior native ability to abuse the 
credulity of their fellow-mortals, which they did with 
such success as to become their oracles, their dictators, 
or even their gods. The multitude most naturally sur- 
rendered themselves to all such delusions. If it may be 
conceived to have been possible that their feeble and 
degraded reason, in the absence of divine light and of 
sound human discipline, might by earnest exertion have 
attained in some small degree to judge better that exer- 
tion was precluded by indolence, by the immediate 
wants and unavoidable employments of life, by sensu- 
ality, by love of amusement, by subjection, even of the 
mind, to superiors and national institutions, and by the 
tendency of human individuals to fall, if we may so ex- 
press it, in dead conformity and addition to the lump. 

The result of all these causes, the sum of all these 
effects, was, that unnumbered millions of beings, whose 
value was in their intelligent and moral nature, were, 
as to that nature, in a condition analogous to what 
their physical existence would have been under a total 
and permanent eclipse of the sun. It was perpetual 
night in their souls, with all the phenomena incident to 
night, except the sublimity. While the material economy, 
constituting the order of things which belonged to their 
temporal existence, was in conspicuous manifestation 
around them, pressing with its realities on their senses ; 
while nature presented to them its open and distinctly- 
featured aspect ; while there was a true light shed on 
them every morning from the sun ; while they had 
constant experimental evidence of the nature of the 
scene ; and thus they had a clear knowledge of one 
portion of the things connected with their existence — 
that portion which they were soon to leave, and look 
back upon as a dream when one awaketh ; — all this 
while there was subsisting, present with them, wnap* 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 37 

prehended except in faint and delusive glimpses, another 
order of things involving their greatest interest, with 
no luminary to make that apparent to them, after the 
race had willingly forgotten the original instructions 
from their Creator. 

The dreadful consequences of this " lack of knowl- 
edge," as appearing in the religion and morals of the 
nations, and through these affecting their welfare, 
equalled and even surpassed all that might by theory 
have been presaged from the cause. 

This ignorance could not annihilate the principle of 
religion in the spirit of man ; but in taking away the 
awful repression of the idea of one exclusive sovereign 
Divinity, it left that spirit to fabricate its religion in 
its own manner. And as the creating of gods might 
be the most appropriate way of celebrating the deliver- 
ance from the most imposing idea of one Supreme 
Being, depraved and insane invention took this direc- 
tion with ardor.* The mind threw a fictitious divinity 
into its own phantasms, and into the objects in the vis- 
ible world. It is amazing to observe how, when one 
solemn principle was taken away, the promiscuous 
numberless crowd of almost all shapes of fancy and of 
matter became, as it were, instinct with ambition, and 
mounted into gods. They were alternately the toys 
and the tyrants of their miserable creator. They ap- 
palled him often, and often he could make sport with 
them. For overawing him by their supposed power, 
they made him a compensation by descending to a fel- 

* Those who have read Goethe's Memoirs of Himself, may 
recollect the part where that late idolized " patriarch" of German 
literature tells of the lively interest he had at one time felt in 
shaping out of his imagination and philosophy a theology, begin- 
ning with the fabrication of a god (or gods,) and amplified into 
a system of principles, existences, and relations. 
4 



38 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

lowship with his follies and vices. But indeed this 
was a condition of their creation ; they must own their 
mortal progenitor by sharing his depravity, even amidst 
the lordly domination assigned to them over him and 
the universe. We may safely affirm, that the mighty 
artificer of deifications, the corrupt soul of man, never 
once, in its almost infinite diversification of device in 
their production, struck out a form of absolute good- 
ness. No, if there were ten thousand deities, there 
should not be one that should be authorized by perfect 
rectitude in itself to punish Mm ; not one by which it 
should be possible for him to be rebuked without hav- 
ing a right to recriminate. 

Such a pernicious creation of active delusions it was 
that took the place of religion in the absence of know- 
ledge. And to this intellectual obscuration, and this 
legion of pestilent fallacies, swarming like the locusts 
from the smoke of the bottomless pit in the vision of 
St. John, the fatal effect on morals and happiness cor- 
responded. Indeed the mischief done there, perhaps 
even exceeded the proportion of the ignorance and the 
false theology ; conformably to the rule, that anything 
wrong in the mind will be the most wrong where it 
comes the nearest to its ultimate practical effect — ex- 
cept when in this operation outward it is met and 
checked by some foreign counteraction. 

The people of those nations (and the same description 
is applicable to modern heathens) did not know the es- 
sential nature of perfect goodness, or virtue. . How 
should they know it? A depraved mind would not 
find in itself any native conception to give the bright 
form of it. There were no living examples of it. 
The men who held the pre-eminence in the community 
were generally, in the most important points, its re- 
verse. It was for the Divine nature to have presented, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 39 

in a manifestation of itself, the archetype of perfect 
rectitude, whence might have been derived the modi- 
fied exemplar for human virtue. And so would the 
idea of perfect moral excellence have come to dwell and 
shine in the understanding, if it had been the True 
Divinity that men beheld in their contemplations of a 
superior existence. But when the gods of their heaveii 
were little better than their own evil qualities, exalted 
to the sky to be thence reflected back upon them in- 
vested with Olympian charms and splendors, their 
ideas of deity would evidently combine with the causes 
which made it impossible for them to conceive a perfect 
model for human excellence. See the mighty labor 
of human depravity to confirm its dominion ! It would 
translate itself to heaven, and usurp divinity, in order 
to come down thence with a sanction for man to be 
wicked, — in order, by a falsification of the qualities of 
the Supreme Nature, to preclude his forming the true 
idea of what would be perfect rectitude in his own. 

A system which could thus associate all the modes 
of turpitude with the most lofty and illustrious forms 
of existence, would go far toward vitiating essentially 
the entire theory of moral good and evil. And it 
would in a great measure defraud of their practical 
efficacy any just principles that might, after all, main- 
tain their place in the convictions of the understanding, 
and assert at times their claim with a voice which not 
even all this ruination could silence. 

But, how small was the number of pure moral prin- 
ciples, (if indeed any,) that among the people of the 
heathen nations did maintain themselves in the convic- 
tions of the understanding. The privation of divine 
light gave full freedom, if there was any disposition to 
take such license, for every perverse speculation which 
could operate toward abolishing those principles in the 
4 



40 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

natural reason of the species. What disposition there 
would be to take it may be imagined, when the abolish- 
ing of those principles was evidently to be also the 
destruction of all intrinsic authority in the practical 
rules founded on them, which destruction would confer 
an exemption infinitely desirable. The freedom for 
such thinking would infallibly be taken, in its utmost 
extent ; and in fact the speculation was stimulated by 
so mighty a force of the depraved passions, that it went 
beyond the primary intention : it not only annulled the 
right principles and rules, but, not stopping at such 
negation, presumed to set forth opposite ones, so that 
the name and repute of virtues was given to iniquities 
without number. It is deplorable to consider how 
large a proportion of all the vices and crimes of which 
mankind were ever guilty, have actually constituted, in 
some or other of their tribes and ages, a part of the 
approved moral and religious system. It is question- 
able whether we could select from the worst forms of 
turpitude any one which has not been at least admitted 
among the authorized customs, if not even appointed 
among the institutes of the religion, of some portion 
of the human race. And depravities thus become 
licensed or sacred would have a fatal facility of com- 
municating somewhat of their quality to all the other 
parts of the moral system. For this sanction both 
would reinforce their own power of infection, and would 
so beguile away all repugnance and counteraction, that 
the rest of the customs and institutes would readily 
admit the contamination, and become assimilated in 
evil ; as the Mohamedans have no care to avoid con- 
tact with their neighbors who are ill of the plague, 
since the plague has the warrant of heaven. Wher- 
ever, therefore, in the imperfect notices afforded us of 
ancient nations, we find any one virulent iniquity hold- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 41 

ing an authorized place in custom or religion, we may 
confidently make a very large inference, though record 
were silent, as to the corresponding quality that would 
pervade the remainder of the moral system of those 
nations. Indeed the inference is equally justified 
whether we regard such a sanction and establishment 
of a flagrant iniquity as a cause, or as an effect. Sup- 
pose this sanction of some one enormity to precede the 
general and equal corruption of morals, — how power- 
fully would it tend to bear them all down to a con- 
formity in depravation. Suppose it to be (the more 
natural order) the result and completion of that cor- 
ruption — how vicious must have been the previous 
state which could go easily and consistently to such a 
consummation. 

Everything that, under the advantage given by this 
destitution of knowledge, operated to the destruction of 
the true morality, both in theory and practice, must 
have had a fatal 'augmentation of its power in that part 
especially of this ignorance which respected hereafter. 
The doctrine of a future existence and retribution did 
not, in any rational and salutary form, interfere in the 
adjustment of the economy of life. The shadowy notion 
of a future state which hovered about the minds of the 
pagans, a vague apparition which alternately came and 
vanished, was at once too fantastic and too little of a 
serious belief to be of any avail to preserve the recti- 
tude, or to maintain the authority, of the distinction 
between right and wrong. It was not defined enough, 
or noble enough, or convincing enough, or of judicial 
application enough, either to assist the efficacy of such 
moral principles as might be supposed to be innate in a 
rational creature, and competent for prescribing to it 
some virtues useful and necessary to it even if its 
present brief existence were all ; or to enjoin effectually 
4* 



42 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

those higher virtues to which there can be no adequate 
inducement but in the expectation of a future life. 

Imagine, if you. can, the withdrawment of this doc- 
trine from the faith of those who have a solemn persua- 
sion of it as a part of revealed truth. Suppose the grand 
idea either wholly obliterated, or faded into a dubious 
trace of what it had been, or transmuted into a poetic 
dream of classic or barbarian mythology, — and how many 
moral principles will be found to have vanished with it. 
How many tkings, before rendered imperative by this 
great article of faith, would have ceased to be duties, or 
would continue such only on the strength, and to the 
extent of the requirement, of some very minor con- 
sideration which might remain to enforce them, and 
that probably in a most deteriorated practical form. 
The sense of obligation, if continuing to recognize the 
nature of duty in things which could then no longer 
retain any such quality, otherwise than as looking to 
the most immediate and tangible benefit or harm, the 
lowest of moral calculations, would be reduced to a 
vulgar and reptile principle. The best of its strength, 
and all its dignity, would be departed from it when it 
could refer no more to eternity, an invisible world, and 
a judgment to come. It would therefore have none of 
that emphasis of impression which can sometimes dis- 
may and quell the most violent passions, as by the 
mysterious awe of the presence of a spirit. It would 
be deprived of that which forms the chief power of 
conscience. And it would be impotent in any attempt 
— if so absurd an attempt could be dreamed of — to 
uphold, in the more dignified character of principle, that 
care of what is right which would be constantly de- 
generating into mere policy, and rationally justifying 
itself in doing so. 

The withdrawment, we said, of the grand truth in 



ON POPULAR IONORANCE. 43 

question, from a man's faith, (together with everything 
of taste and habit which that faith might have created,) 
would necessarily break up the government over his 
conscience. How evident then is it, that among the 
people of the heathen lands, under a disastrous igno- 
rance of this and all the other sublime *truths, that are 
the most fit to rule an immortal being during his sojourn 
on earth, no man could feel any peremptory obligation 
to be universally virtuous, or adequate motives to excite 
an endeavor to approach that high attainment, even 
were there not a perfect inability to form the true con- 
ception of it. And then how much of course it was 
that the general mass would be dreadfully depraved. 
Though a momentary surprise may at times have seized 
us on the occurrence, in their history, of some monstrous 
form of flagitiousness, we do not wonder at beholding a 
state of the people such in its general character as the 
sacred writers exhibit, in descriptions to which the other 
records of antiquity add their confirming testimony and 
ample illustrations. For while the immense aggregate 
is displayed to the mental view, as pervaded, agitated, 
and stimulated, by the restless forces of appetites and 
passions, and those forces operating with an impulse no 
less perverted than strong, let it be asked what kinds 
and measure of restraint there could be upon such a 
world of creatures so actuated, to keep them from 
rushing in all ways into evil. Conceive, if you can, the 
fiction of such a multitude, so actuated, having been 
placed under an adjustment of restraints competent to 
withhold them. And then take off, in your imagination, 
one after another of these, to see what will follow. Take 
off, at last, all the coercion that can be applied through 
the belief of a judgment to come, and a future state of 
retribution ; — by doing which you would also empower 
the race to defy, if any recognition of him remained, 



44 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the Supreme Governor, whose possible inflictions, be- 
ing confined to the present life, might at any time be 
escaped by shortening it. All these sacred bonds being 
thus dissolved, behold this countless multitude aban- 
doned to be carried or driven the whole length to which 
the impulses of their appetites and passions would go, — 
or could go before they were arrested by some obstruc- 
tion opposed to them from a quarter foreign to con- 
science. And the main and final thing in reserve to 
limit their career, after all the worthier restraints were 
annihilated, would be only this, — the resistance which 
men's self-interest opposes to one another's bad incli- 
nations. A gloomy and humiliating spectacle truly it 
is, to be offered by a world of rational and moral agents, 
if we see that, instead of a repression of the propensity 
to wickedness by reverence of the Sovereign Judge, 
and the anticipation of a future life, there is merely a 
restraint put on its external activity, and that by the 
force of men's fears of one another. But nearly to this 
it was, as the only strong restraint, that those heathens 
were left by their ignorance, or a notion so slight as to 
be little better, of a future existence and judgment. 

Not but that it has been, in all nations and times, of 
infinite practical service that there is involved in the 
constitution of the world a law by which a coarse self- 
interest thus interposes to obstruct in a degree the 
violent propensity to evil ; for it has prevented, under 
Providence, more actual mischief, beyond comparison 
more, than all other causes together. The man inclined 
to perpetrate an iniquity, of the nature of a wrong to 
his fellow-mortals, is apprized that he shall provoke a 
reaction, to resist or punish him ; that he shall incur 
as great an evil as that he is disposed to do, or greater ; 
that either a revenge regardless of all formalities of 
justice will strike him, or a process instituted in 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 45 

organized society will vindictively reach his property, 
liberty, or life. This defensive array, of all men against 
all men, compels to remain shut up within the mind an 
immensity of wickedness which is there burning to 
come out into action. But for this, Noah's flood had 
been rendered needless. But for this, our planet might 
have been accomplishing its circles round the sun for 
thousands of years past without a human inhabitant. 
Through the effect of this essential law, in the social 
economy, it was possible for the race to subsist, not- 
withstanding all that ignorance of the Divine Being, 
of heavenly truth, and of uncorrupt morality, in which 
we are contemplating the heathen nations as benighted. 
But while thus it prevented utter destruction, it had 
no corrective operation on the depravity of the heart. 
It was not through a judgment of things being essen- 
tially evil that they were forborne ; it was not by the 
power of conscience that wicked propensity was kept 
under restraint. It was only by a hold on the meaner 
principles of his nature, that the offender in will was 
arrested in prevention of the deed. And so the race 
were such virtually, as they would have hastened to 
become actually, could they have ceased to be afraid of 
one another's strength and retaliation.* 

But even this restraint imposed by mutual apprehen- 
sion, important as its operation was in the absence of 
nobler influences, was yet of miserably partial efficacy. 
Men were continually breaking through this protective 
provision, and committed against one another a stupen- 
dous amount of crimes. And no wonder, when we 
consider that the evil passions, endowed as they seem 

* It is not very uncommon to hear credit given to human na- 
ture apparently in sober simplicity, for the whole amount of the 
negation of bad actions tfais prevented, as just so much genuine 
virtue, by some dealers in moral and theological speculation. 



46 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

to be with a portentous excess of vigor by the very- 
circumstance of being evil, (as the demoniacs were the 
strongest of men,) are exasperated the more by a cer- 
tain degree of awe impressed on them by the defensive 
attitude of their objects. When strength so great 
might thus be irritated to greater, and when there 
were no " powers of the world to come," to invade the 
dreadful cavern of iniquity in the mind, and there com- 
bat and subdue it, there would often be no want of 
the audacity to send it forth into action at all hazards, 
and in defiance and contempt of the restraining force 
which operated through mutual fear of vindictive reac- 
tion. 

But it may be said, perhaps, that in thus represent- 
ing the people who were destitute of divine knowledge, 
as left with hardly any other control on their bad dis- 
positions than one of a quality little more dignified than 
fetters literally binding the limbs, we are underrating 
what there still was among them to take effect in the 
way of instruction. Even this coarse principle of con- 
trol itself, it may be alleged, this prudence of reciprocal 
fear became refined into something worthier of moral 
agents. For it passed, by a compromise among the 
species, from the form of individual self-defence and 
revenge into that of institutions of law ; and legisla- 
tion, it will be said, is a teacher of morals. Retaining, 
indeed, the rough expedient of physical force, in readi- 
ness to coerce or punish where it cannot deter by 
warning, it yet strongly endeavors the repression of 
evil emotions by means of right principles, marked out, 
explained, and inculcated. It teaches these principles 
as dictates of reason and justice, while it embodies 
them in the menacing authority of enactments. There 
was therefore, it may be pleaded, as much instruction 
among the ancient heathen as there was legislation. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 47 

In answering this, we may forego any rigorous ex- 
amination of the quality of principles and precepts 
enunciated by legislators who themselves, in common 
with the people, looked on human existence and duty 
through a worse than twilight medium ; who had no 
divine oracles to impart wisdom, and were, some of 
them, reduced to begin their operations with the lie 
that pretended they had such oracles ; from all which 
it was inevitable that some of their maxims and injunc- 
tions would even in their efficacy be noxious, as being 
at variance with eternal rectitude. It is enough to ob- 
serve, on the claims of legislation to the character of a 
moral preceptor, that it retained so palpably, after all, 
the nature of the gross element from which it was a 
refinement or transfusion, that even what it might 
teach right, as to the matter, it was unable to teach 
with the right moral impression. With all its gravity, 
and phrases of wisdom, and show of homage to virtue, 
it was, and was' plainly descried to be, that very same 
Noli me tangere, in a disguised form ; a less provoking 
and hostile manner only of keeping up the state of 
preparation for defensive war. Every one knew right 
well that the pure approbation and love of goodness 
were not the source of law ; but that it was an arrange- 
ment originating and deriving all its force from self- 
interest ; a contrivance by which each man was glad to 
make the collective strength of society his guarantee 
against his neighbor's interest and wish to do him 
wrong. While pleased that others were under this re- 
straint, he was often vexed at being under it also him- 
self ; but on the whole deemed this security worth the 
cost of suffering the interdict on his own inclinations, — « 
perhaps as believing other men's to be still worse than 
his, or seeing their strength to be greater. We repeat 
that a preceptive system thus estimated could not, 



48 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

even had the principles to which it gave expression in 
the mandates of law been no other than those of the 
soundest morality, have impressed them with the 
weight of sanctity on the conscience. And all this but 
tends to show the necessity that the rules and sanctions 
of morality, to come with simplicity and power on the 
human mind, should primarily emanate, and be ac- 
knowledged as emanating, from a Being exalted above 
all implication and competition of interest with man. 

Thus we see, that the pagan ignorance precluded one 
grand requisite for crushing the dominion of iniquity ; 
for there was nothing to insinuate or to force its way 
into the recesses of the soul, to apply there a repress- 
ive power to the depraved ardor which glowed in the 
passions. That was left, inaccessible and inextinguish- 
able, as the subterranean fires in a volcanic region. 
And in the mighty impulse to evil with which it was 
continually operating as an energy of feeling, it com- 
pelled the subservience of the intellect ; and thus com- 
bined the passions with a faculty skilful to guide their 
direction, to diversify their objects, to invent expedients, 
and to seize and create occasions. What was it that 
this intelligent depravity would stop short of accom- 
plishing ? Reflect on the extent of human genius, in 
its powers of invention, combination, and adaptation; 
and then think of all this faculty, in an immense num- 
ber of minds, through many ages, and in every imagin- 
able variety of situation, exerted with unremitting ac- 
tivity in aid of the wrong propensities. Reflect how 
many ideas, apt and opportune for this service, would 
spring up casually, or be suggested by circumstances, 
or be attained by the earnest study of beings goaded 
in pursuit of change and novelty. The simple modes 
of iniquity were put under an active ministry of art, to 
combine, innovate, and augment. And so indefatigable 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 49 

was its exercise, that almost all conceivable forms of 
immorality were brought to imagination, most of them 
into experiment, and the greater number into prevail- 
ing practice, in those nations : insomuch that the sated 
monarch would have imposed as difficult a task on 
ingenuity in calling for the invention of a new vice, as 
of a new pleasure. They would perhaps have been 
nearly identical demands when he was the person to be 
pleased. 

Such are some of the most obvious illustrations that 
the absence of knowledge was a cause, and added in 
an unknown measure to the strength of all other causes, 
of the excessive corruption in the heathen nations. 
And if this depravity of a world of moral agents did 
not, contemplated simply as a destruction of their rec- 
titude, appear equivalent to the gravest import of the 
terms "the people are destroyed," the misery insepar- 
able from the depravity instantly comes in our view to 
complete their'verification. 

We are aware that the wickedness and misery of the 
ancient world, as asserted in illustration of the natural 
effect of estrangement from divine truth, are apt to be 
regarded as of the order of topics which have dwin- 
dled into insignificance, worn out by being repeated 
just because they have often been repeated before ; a 
sort of exhausted quarries and dried-up wells. There 
is a certain class of vain and sneering mortals, in whose 
conceit nothing is such proof of superior sense as dis- 
carding the greatest number of topics and arguments 
as obsolete or impertinent. It is to be reckoned on that 
some of these, on hearing again the old maxims, that 
a people without divine instruction must be a vicious 
one, and that a vicious people must be an unhappy 
one, — and those maxims accompanied with a descrip- 
tion of the old pagan world as illustrative evidence, — 
5* 



50 ON POPULAR T GNORANCE. 

will be prompt to let forth their comments in some 
such strain as the following : — " The state of the an- 
cient heathens, thus brought upon us in one cheap 
declamation more, is now a matter of trivial import, 
just fit to give some show and exaggeration to the stale 
common-place, that ignorance is likely to produce de- 
pravity, and that depravity and misery are likely 
enough to go together. The pagans might be wretch- 
ed enough ; and perhaps also the matter has been ex- 
travagantly magnified for the service of a favorite 
theme, or to make a rhetorical show. At any rate, it 
is not now worth while to go so far back to concern 
ourselves about it. The ancient heathens had their 
day and their destiny, and it is of little importance to 
us what they were or suffered." 

It is fortunate, we may reply, to be " wiser than the 
ancients," without the trouble of learning anything by 
means of them. It is fortunate, also, to have ascer- 
tained how much of all that ever existed can teach us 
nothing. We have a signal improvement in the fashion 
of wisdom, when that high endowment may be pos- 
sessed as a thing distinct from compass of thought, 
from study of causes and effects as illustrated on the 
great scale, from aptitude to be instructed by the past, 
and from contemplation of the divine government as 
carried over a wide extent of time. But indeed this is 
not a privilege peculiar to this later day. In any for- 
mer age there were men in sufficient number who were 
wise enough to be indifferent to all but immediate pass- 
ing events, as knowing no lessons that persons like 
them had to learn from remoter views, looking either 
into the past or the future ; who could even have be- 
fore them the very monuments of awful events that 
were gone by, without perceiving inscribed on them 
any characters for contemplation to read. It is not im- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 51 

possible there might be persons who could plan their 
schemes, and debate their questions, and even follow 
their amusements, quite exempt from solemn reflec- 
tions, within view of the ruins of Jerusalem, after the 
Roman legions had left it and its myriads of dead to 
silence. Any reference to that dreadful spectacle, as 
an example of the consequences of the ignorance and 
wickedness of a people, might have been heard with 
unconcern, and lightly passed over as foreign to the 
matters requiring their attention : it was all over with 
the people dead, and the people alive had their own 
concerns to mind. But would not exactly such as 
these have been the men most likely to fall into the 
vices and impieties which would provoke the next 
avenging visitation, and to perish in it ? In all times, 
the triflers with the great exemplifications of the con- 
nection of depravity with misery and ruin, who thought 
it but an impertinent moralizing that attempted to re- 
call such funereal spectacles for admonition, were fools, 
whatever self-complacency they might feel in a habit 
of thinking more fitted, they would perhaps say, for 
making our best advantage of the world as we find it. 
And we of the present time are convicted of exceed- 
ing stupidity, if we think it not worth while to go a 
number of ages back to contemplate the mass of man- 
kind, the wide world of beings such as ourselves, sunk 
in darkness and wretchedness, and to consider what it 
is that is taught by so melancholy an exhibition. What 
is to give fulness of evidence to an instruction, if a 
world be too narrow ; what is to give it weight, if a 
world be too light ? 

It is to be acknowledged, that the mental darkness 
which we are representing as so greatly the cause of 
the wickedness and unhappiness of those nations of old, 
had the effect of protecting them, in a measure, from 



52 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

some kinds of suffering. They had not, as we have 
been observing, illumination enough, to have conscience 
enough, for inflicting the severest pains of remorse ; 
and for oppressing them with a distinct alarming appre- 
hension of a future account. But that they were un- 
happy, was practically acknowledged in the very qual- 
ity of what they ardently and universally sought as 
the highest felicities of existence. Those delights 
were violent and tumultuous, in all possible ways and 
degrees estranged from reflection, and adverse to it. 
The whole souls of great and small, in the most barba- 
rous and in the more polished state, were passionately 
set on revelry, on expedients for inflaming licentiousness 
to madness ; or concourses of multitudes for pomps, 
celebrations, shows, games, combats ; on the riots of 
exultation and revenge after victories. The ruder na- 
tions had, in their way, however pitiable on the score 
of magnificence, their grand festive, triumphal, and de- 
moniac confluxes and re veilings. To these joys of tu- 
mult, the people of the savage and the more cultiva- 
ted nations sacrificed everything belonging to the peace- 
ful economy of life, with a desperate, frantic fury. All 
this was the confession that there was little felicity in 
the heart or in the home. ]STor was it found in these 
resources ; if the wild elation might be mistaken for 
happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance, 
and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness of the 
soul. 

The fact of their being unhappy had a still more 
gloomy attestation in the mutual enmity which seems 
to have been of the very essence of life so vital a prin- 
ciple, that it could not be spared for an hour. No, 
they could not live without this luxury drawn from the 
fountains of death! What is the most conspicuous 
material of ancient history, what is it that glares out 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 53 

the most hideously from that darkness and oblivion in 
•which the old world is veiling its aspect, but the inces- 
sant furies of miserable mortals against their fellow- 
mortals, " hateful and hating one another ?" We can- 
not look that way but we see the whole field covered 
with inflicters and sufferers, not seldom interchanging 
those characters. If that field widens to our view, it 
is still, to the utmost line to which the shade clears 
away, a scene of cruelty, oppression, and slavery ; of 
the strong trampling on the weak, and the weak often 
attempting to bite at the feet of the strong ; of rancor- 
ous animosities and murderous competitions of persons 
raised above the mass of the community ; of treach- 
eries and massacres ; and of war between hordes, and 
cities, and nations, and empires ; war never, in spirit, 
intermitted, and suspended sometimes in act only to 
acquire renewed force for destruction, or to find anoth- 
er assemblage of hated creatures to cut in pieces. 
Powerful as " the spirit of the first-born Cain" has 
continued, down to our age, and in the most improved 
divisions of mankind, there was, nevertheless, in the 
ancient pagan race, (as there is in some portions of the 
modern,) a more complete, uncontrolled actuation of 
the all-killing, all-devouring fury, a more absolute pos- 
session of Moloch. 

Now it is as misery that we are exhibiting all this 
depravity. To be thus, was suffering. The disease 
and the pain are inseparable in the description, and 
they were so in the reality. And both together, in- 
evitably seizing on beings who had rejected or lost 
divine knowledge, maintained a hold as fatal and in- 
vincible as that of the intervolved serpents of La- 
ocoon. 

It is true, that a comprehensive estimate of the state 
of the people we are contemplating, would bring in 
5* 



54 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

view several minor circumstances which, though not 
availing to change materially the effect of the picture, 
are themselves of less gloomy color. But at the same 
time such an estimate -would include other forms also 
of infelicity, besides those which were at once the 
result and punishment of depravity, the stings with 
which sin rewarded the infatuation that loved it. If 
the design had been to exhibit anything like a general 
view, we must have taken account of such particulars 
as these : the unhappiness of being without an assurance 
of an all-comprehending and merciful Providence, and 
of wanting therefore the best support in sorrow and 
calamity; the insuppressible impatience, or the deep 
melancholy, with which the more thoughtful persons 
must have seen departing from life, leaving them 
hopeless of ever meeting again in a life elsewhere, 
the relations or associates who were dear to them in 
spite of the prevailing effect of paganism to destroy 
philanthropy ; and the gloomy sentiment with which 
they must have thought of their own continual approach 
toward death ; a sentiment not always unaccompanied 
with certain intimidating hints and hauntings of pos- 
sibilities in the darkness beyond that confine. But the 
more limited intention in the preceding description 
has been to illustrate their unhappiness as inflicted by 
their depravity, necessarily consequent on their igno- 
rance. And what words so true, so irresistibly prompted 
at the view of such a scene, as those pronounced of a 
nation that at once despised the pagans and imitated 
them, — " The people are destroyed for lack of knowl- 
edge." 

Let us not be suspected of having lost sight of the 
fact, that vice and misery have, in our nature, a deeper 
source than ignorance; or of being so absurd as to 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 55 

imagine that if the inestimable truths unknown to the 
heathen world had been, on the contrary, in all men's 
knowledge, but a slight portion of the depravity and 
wretchedness we have described could then have had 
an existence. To say, that under long absence of the 
sun any tract of terrestrial nature must infallibly be 
reduced to desolation, is not to say or imply, that under 
the benignant influence of that luminary the same 
region must, as necessarily and unconditionally, be a 
scene of beauty ; but the only hope, for the only pos- 
sibility, is for the field visited by much of that sweet 
influence. And it were an absurdity no less gross in 
the opposite extreme to the one just mentioned, to as- 
sert the uselessness, for rectifying the moral world, of 
a diffusion of the knowledge which shall compel men 
to see what is wrong ; to deny that the impulses of the 
corrupt passions and will must suffer some abatement 
of their force and daring when encountered, like 
Balaam meeting the angel, by a clear manifestation of 
their bad and ruinous tendency, by a convinced judg- 
ment, a protesting conscience, and the aspect of the 
Almighty Judge, — instead of their being under the 
tolerance of a judgment not instructed to condemn 
them, or, (as ignorance is sure to quicken into error,) 
perverted to abet them. 



SECTION II. 



From this view of the prevalence and malignant 
effects of ignorance among the people of the ancient 
world, both Jews and Gentiles, we may come down, 
with a few brief notices in passing over the long sub- 
sequent periods, towards our own times. For any 
attempt to prosecute the object through the ages and 
regions of later heathenism, (with the infatuated 
Judaism still more destructive to its subjects,) would 
be to lose ourselves in a boundless scene of desolation, 
an immense amplitude of darkness, frightfully alive 
throughout with the activity of all noxious and 
hideous things. 

But by this time we are become aware how con- 
tinually we are driven upon what will be in hazard of 
appearing an exaggerated phraseology ; insomuch that 
we are almost afraid of accepting the epithets of 
description and aggravation which offer themselves as 
most appropriate to the subject. There are some self- 
complacent persons whose minds are so unapt to recog- 
nize the magnitude of a subject, or so averse perhaps 
to the contemplation of it if it be of tragical aspect, 
that strong terms accumulated to exhibit even what 
surpasses in its plain reality all the powers of language, 
offend them as declamatory exaggeration. Let it then 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 57 

be just observed, without one ambitious epithet, that 
since that period when ancient history, strictly so 
named, left off describing the state of mankind, more 
than a myriad of millions of our race have been on 
earth, and quitted it without one ray of the knowledge 
the most important to spirits sojourning here, and going 
hence. 

But while any attempt to carry the representation 
of the fatal effects of ignorance over the extent of so 
dreary a scene is declined, let it not be forgotten that 
they have been an awful reality ; that they have actu- 
ally existed, in time, and place, and number of victims ; 
that there actually were the men, and so many men, 
who exemplified, and in so many ways, the truth we 
are illustrating. And a truth which has its demonstra- 
tion in facts ought to come with the weight of all the 
facts that we believe ever did demonstrate it.- When 
they are not presented in breadth and detail prominently 
in our view, we are apt to lose the due effect of our 
knowing them to have existed. 

It will be enough to advert very briefly to the Mo- 
hammedan imposture, though that is perhaps the most 
signal instance within all time, of a malignant delusion 
maintained directly and immediately by ignorance, by 
an absolute determination and even n fanatic zeal not to 
receive one new idea. Tenets involving the most pal- 
pable impossibilities, and asserted in self-contradictory 
terms, must stand inviolable to all question or contro- 
versy ; literature must be scouted as a profane folly ; 
not a principle of true philosophy is to be admitted ; 
hardly is an application of the plainest mechanics to 
improve a machine or implement to be tolerated ; or 
an infidel is to be only pardoned, through contempt, for 
a successful obtrusion of science to render the most 
important service, — to save, for instance, a Mussulman 



58 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ship with its proud, besotted commander and crew from 
destruction,* lest an acknowledgment made to science 
should allow one momentary surmise of imperfection 
to insult the all-sufficiency and sanctity of the unalter- 
able creed and institutes ; lest any diminutive crevice 
should be made on any side of the temple of the vile 
superstition, for the passage of one glimpse of true 
light to annoy the foul fiend that dwells there, invested 
" in the dunnest smoke of hell." Not, however, that 
this is the policy of doubt and apprehension, the evad- 
ing and repelling caution of men who suspect them- 
selves to be wrong and dread being forced to meet the 
proof. For the subjects of this execrable usurpation 
on the human understanding have, in general, the firm- 
est assurance that all things in the system are right : 
it has itself secured them against knowing anything that 
could discompose their sense of certainty. No fell 
savage, or serpent, or monster, ever had a more perfect 
instinct to avail itself of an impervious obscurity for its 
lurking-place, than this imposture has shown to keep 
out all mental light from its realm. The delusion is so 
strong and absolute in ignorance, is so identified with 
it, and so systematically repels at all points the ap- 
proach of knowledge, that it is difficult to conceive a 
mode of its extermination that shall not involve some 
fearful destruction, in the most literal sense, of the 
people whom it possesses. And such a catastrophe it 
is probable the great body of them, in the temper 
of mind prevailing among them at this hour, would 
choose to incur by preference, we do not say to a se- 
rious, patient consideration of the true religion, but even 
to the admission among them of a system merely favor- 
ing knowledge in general, an order of measures which 

* There is a very curious example of this related in Dr. 
Clarke's Travels. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 59 

should urge upon the adults, and peremptorily enforce 
for the children, a discipline of intellectual improvement. 
There would be little national hesitation of choice, (at 
least in the central regions of the dominion of this hate- 
ful imposture,) between the introduction of any general 
system of expedients for driving them from their stu- 
pefaction into something like thinking and learning, and 
a general plague, to rage as long as any remained for 
victims.* 

But let us now look, for a moment, at the intellectual 
state of the people denominated Christian, during the 
ages preceding the Reformation. The best of all the 
acquisitions by earth from heaven, Christianity, might 
have seemed to bring with it an inevitable necessity of 
a great and permanent difference soon to be effected, in 
regard to the competence of men's knowledge to pre- 
vent their destruction. It was as if, in the physical 
system, some one production, far more salutary to life 
than all the other things furnished from the "elements, 
had been reserved by the Creator to spring up in a 
later age, after many generations of men had been lan- 
guishing through life, and prematurely dying, from the 
deficient virtue of their sustenance and remedies. The 
image of the inestimable plant had been shown to the 
prophets in their visions, but the reality was now given 
to the world ; it was of "wholly a right seed," " had 
the seed in itself," and claimed to be cultivated by the 

* In the interval since this was written, some change has taken 
place in favor of the admission of the elements of knowledge, in 
the capital, and in the second city of the Mohammedan regions ; 
but with very slight alterative influence on the mass ; and with 
respect to the faith, probably none at all. "Within this interval, 
also, the central power has been hastening rapidly to its catas- 
trophe. 



60 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

people, who in every land were suffering the maladies 
which it had the properties to heal. But, while by the 
greater part of mankind it was not accounted worth 
admission to a place on their blasted, desolated soil, the 
manner in which its virtue was frustrated among those 
who pretended to esteem it, as it was, the best gift of 
the divine beneficence, is recorded in eternal reproach 
of the Christian nations. 

As the hostility of heathenism, in the direct en- 
deavors to extirpate the Christian religion, became 
evidently hopeless, in the nations within the Roman 
empire, there was a grand change of the policy of evil ; 
and all manner of reprobate things, heathenism itself 
among them, rushed as by general conspiracy into 
treacherous conjunction with Christianity, retaining 
their own quality under the sanction of its name, and 
by a rapid process reducing it to surrender almost 
everything distinctive of it but that dishonored name : 
and all this under protection of the " gross darkness 
covering the people." There were indeed in existence 
the inspired oracles, and these could not be essentially 
falsified. But there was no lack of expedients and pre- 
texts for keeping them in* a great measure secreted. 
It might be done under a pretence that reverence for 
their sanctity required they should be secluded as 
within the recesses of a temple, nor be there consulted 
but by consecrated personages ; a pretence excellently 
contrived, since it was its own security against exposure, 
the people being thus kept unaware that the sacred 
writings themselves expressly invited popular inspec- 
tion, by declaring themselves addressed to mankind at 
large. The deceivers were not worse off for the other 
facilities. In the progress of translation, the holy 
Scriptures could be intercepted and stopped short in a 
language but little less unintelligible than the original 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 61 

ones to the bulk of the people, in order that this " pro- 
fane vulgar" might never hear the very words of God, 
but only such report as it should please certain men, at 
their discretion, to give of what he had said ; men, 
however, of whom the majority were themselves too 
ignorant to cite it in even a falsified import. But 
though the people had understood the language, in the 
usage of social converse, there was a grand security 
against them in keeping them so destitute of the knowl- 
edge of letters, that the Bible, if such a rare thing ever 
could happen to fall into any of their hands, would be 
no more to them than a scroll of hieroglyphics. When 
to this was added, the great cost of a copy of so large 
a book before the invention of printing, it remained 
perhaps just worth while, (and it would be a matter of 
no difficulty or daring,) to make it, in the maturity 
of the system, an offence, and sacrilegious invasion of 
sacerdotal privilege, to look into a Bible. If it might 
seem hard thus to constitute a new sin, in addition to 
the long list already denounced by the divine law, 
amends were made by indulgently rescinding some ar- 
ticles in that list, and qualifying the principles of obli- 
gation with respect to them all. 

In this latency of the sacred authorities, withdrawn 
from all communication with the human understanding, 
there were retained still many of the terms and namej 
belonging to religion. They remained, but they re- 
mained only such as they could be when the departing 
spirit of that religion was leaving them void of their 
import and solemnity, and so rendered applicable to 
purposes of deception and mischief. They were as holy 
vessels, in which the original contents might, as they 
were escaping, be clandestinely replaced by the most 
malignant preparations. And as crafty and wicked 
men had a direct interest in this substitution, the per- 
6 



62 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

nicious operation went on incessantly ; and with an 
ability, and to an extent to evince that the utmost bar- 
barism, of the times cannot extinguish genius, when it is 
iniquity that sets it on fire. How prolific was the in- 
vention of the falsehoods and absurdities of notion, and 
of the vanities and corruptions of practice, which it 
was devised to make the terms and names of religion 
designate and sanction! while it was also managed, 
with no less sedulity and success, that the inventors 
and propagators should be held in submissive reverence 
by the community, as the oracular depositaries of truth. 
That community had not knowledge enough of any 
other kind, to create a resisting and defensive power 
against this imposition in the concern of religion. A 
sound exercise of reason on subjects out of that prov- 
ince, a moderate degree of instruction in literature 
and science rightly so called, might have produced, in 
the persons of superior native capacity, somewhat of a 
competency and a disposition to question, to examine, 
to call for evidence, and to detect some of the fallacies 
imposed for Christian faith. But in such completeness 
of ignorance, the general mind was on all sides pressed 
and borne down to its fate. All reaction ceased ; and 
the people were reduced to exist in one huge, unintel- 
iigent, monotonous substance, united by the interfusion 
of a vile superstition, which permitted just enough 
mental life in the mass to leave it capable of being 
actuated to all the purposes of cheats, and tyrants, — a 
proper subject for the dominion of " our Lord God the 
Pope," as he was sometimes denominated ; and might 
have been denominated without exciting indignation, 
in the hearing of millions of beings bearing the form of 
men and the name of Christians. 

Reflect that all this took place under the nominal 
ascendency of the best and brightest economy of in- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 63 

struction from heaven. Reflect that it was in nations 
where even the sovereign authority professed homage 
to the religion of Christ, and adopted and enforced it as 
a grand national institution, that the popular mass was 
thus reduced to a material fit for all the bad uses to 
which priestcraft could wish to put the souls and 
bodies of its slaves. And then consider what should 
have been the condition of this great aggregate, 
wherever Christianity was acknowledged by all as the 
true religion. The people should have consisted of so 
many beings having each, in some degree, the inde- 
pendent, beneficial use of his mind ; all of them trained 
with a reference to the necessity of their being ap- 
prized of their responsibility to their Creator, for the 
exercise of their reason on the matters of belief and 
choice; all of them capacitated for improvement by 
being furnished with the rudiments and instrumental 
means of knowledge ; and all having within their reach, 
in their own language, the Scriptures of divine truth, 
some by immediate possession, the rest by means of 
faithful readers, while the book existed only in manu- 
script ; all of them after it came to be printed. 

Can any doubt arise, whether there were in the 
Christian states resources competent, if so applied, to 
secure to all the people an elementary instruction, and 
the possession of the printed Bible ? Resources com- 
petent ! All nations, sufficiently raised above bar- 
barism to exist as states, have consumed, in uses the 
most foreign and pernicious to their welfare, an in- 
finitely greater amount of means than would have 
sufficed, after due provision for comfortable physical 
subsistence, to afford a moderate share of instruction 
to all the people. And in those popish ages, that ex- 
penditure alone which went to ecclesiastical use would 
have been far more than adequate to this beneficent 



64 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

purpose. Think of the boundless cost for supporting 
the magnificence and satiating the rapacity of the hie- 
rarchy, from its triple-crowned head, down through all 
the orders branded with a consecration under that 
head to maintain the delusion and share the spoil. 
Recollect the immense system of policy for jurisdiction 
and intrigue, every agent of which was a devourer. 
Recollect the pomps and pageants, for which the 
general resources were to be taxed : while the general 
industry was injured by the interruption of useful em- 
ployment, and the diversion of the people to such dissi- 
pation as their condition qualified and permitted them 
to indulge in. Think also of the incalculable cost of 
ecclesiastical structures, the temples of idolatry as in 
truth they were. One of the most striking situations 
for a religious and reflective Protestant is, that of pass- 
ing some solitary hour under the lofty vault, among 
the superb arches and columns, of any one of the most 
splendid of these edifices remaining at this day in our 
own country. If he has sensibility and taste, the mag- 
nificence, the graceful union of so many diverse inven- 
tions of art, the whole mighty creation of genius that 
quitted the world without leaving even a name, will 
come with magical impression on his mind, while it is 
contemplatively darkening into the awe of antiquity. 
But he will be recalled, — the sculptures, the inscrip- 
tions, the sanctuaries enclosed off for the special benefit, 
after death, of persons who had very different concerns 
during life from that of the care of their salvation, and 
various other insignia of the original character of the 
place, will help to recall him, — to the thought, that 
these proud piles were in fact raised to celebrate the 
. conquest, and prolong the dominion, of the Power of 
Barkness over the souls of the people. They were as 
triumphal arches, erected in memorial of the extermi- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 65 

nation of that truth which was given to be the life of 
men. 

As he looks round, and looks upwards, on the prod- 
igy of design, and skill, and perseverance, and tribu- 
tary wealth, he may image to himself the multitudes 
that, during successive ages, frequented this fane in 
the assured belief, that the idle ceremonies and im- 
pious superstitions, which they there performed or 
witnessed, were a service acceptable to heaven, and to 
be repaid in blessings to the offerers. 

He may say to himself, Here, on this very floor, 
under that elevated and decorated vault, in a " dim 
religious light" like this, but with the darkness of the 
shadow of death in their souls, they prostrated them- 
selves to their saints, or their " queen of heaven ;" nay, 
to painted images and toys of wood or wax, to some 
ounce or two of bread and wine, to fragments of old 
bones, and rags of cast-off vestments. Hither they 
came, when conscience, in looking back or pointing 
forward, dismayed them, to purchase remission with 
money or atoning penances, or to acquire the privilege 
of sinning with impunity in a certain manner, or for a 
certain time ; and they went out at yonder door in the 
perfect confidence that the priest had secured, in the 
pne case the suspension, in the other the satisfaction, 
of the divine law. Here they solemnly believed, as 
they were taught, that, by donatives to the church, 
they delivered the souls of their departed sinful rela- 
tions from their state of punishment ; and they went 
out of that door resolved, such as had possessions, to 
bequeath some portion of them, to operate in the 
same manner for themselves another day, in the highly 
probable case of similar need. Here they were con- 
vened to listen in reverence to some representative 
emissary from the Man of Sin, with new dictates of 
6* 



ON POPULAR IGx\ T ORANCE. 



blasphemy or iniquity promulgated in the name of the 
Almighty : or to witness the trickery of some farce, 
devised to cheat or frighten them out of whatever re- 
mainder the former impositions might have left them 
of sense, conscience, or property. Here, in fine, there 
was never presented to their understanding, from their 
childhood to their death, a comprehensive, honest declar- 
ation of the laws of duty, and the pure doctrines of 
salvation. To think ! that they should have mistaken 
for the house of God, and the very gate of heaven, 
a place where the Regent of the nether world had so 
short a way to come from his dominions, and his agents 
and purchased slaves so short a way to go thither. 
If we could imagine a momentary visit from Him who 
once entered a fabric of sacred denomination with a 
scourge, because it was made the resort of a common 
traffic, with what aspect and voice, with what infliction 
but the "rebuke with flames of fire," would he have 
entered this mart of iniquity, assuming the name of his 
sanctuary, where the traffic was in delusions, crimes, 
and the souls of men ? It was even as if, to use the 
prophet's language, the very " stone cried out of the 
wall, and the beam out of the timber answered it," in 
denunciation; for a portion of the means of building, 
in the case of some of these edifices, was obtained as 
the price of dispensations and pardons.* 

In such a hideous light would the earlier history of 
one of these mighty structures, pretendedly consecrated 1 
to Christianity, be presented to the reflecting Protes- * 
tant ; and then would recur the idea of its cost, as rela- 
tive to what that expenditure might really have done 
for Christianity and the people. It absorbed in the ' 
construction, sums sufficient to have supplied, costly as i 
they would have been, even manuscript Bibles, in the 
* That most superb Salisbury Cathedral, for example. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 67 

people's own language, (as a priesthood of truly apos- 
tolic character would have taken care the Scriptures 
should speak,) to all the families of a province ; and in 
the revenues appropriated to its ministration of super- 
stition, enough to have provided men to teach all those 
[families to read those Bibles. 

In all this, and in the whole constitution of the 
Grand Apostasy, involving innumerable forms of abuse 
and abomination, to which our object does not require 
any allusion, how sad a spectacle is held forth of the 
people destroyed for lack of knowledge. If, as one of 
their plagues, an inferior one in itself, they were plun- 
dered as we have seen, of their worldly goods, it was 
that the spoil might subserve to a still greater wrong. 
What was lost to the accommodation of the body, was 
[to be made to contribute to the depravation of the 
spirit. It supplied means for multiplying the powers 
of the grand ecclesiastical machinery, and confirming 
the intellectual despotism of the usurpers of spiritual 
authority. Those authorities enforced on the people, 
on pain of perdition, an acquiescence in notions and 
prdinances which, in effect, precluded their direct access 
to the Almighty, and the Saviour of the world ; inter- 
posing between them and the Divine Majesty a very 
extensive, complicated, and heathenish mediation, which 
in a great measure substituted itself for the real and 
exclusive mediation of Christ, obscured by its vast 
[creation of intercepting vanities the glory of the 
[Eternal Being, and thus almost extinguished the true 
Iworship. But how calamitous was such a condition ! 
— to be thus intercepted from direct intercourse with 
the Supreme Spirit, and to have the solemn and eleva- 
ting sentiment of devotion flung downward, on objects 
to some of which even the most superstitious could 
hardly pay homage without a sense of degradation. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 



. 



It was, again, a disastrous thing to "be under a 
rectory of practical life framed for the convenience of 
a corrupt system ; a rule which enjoined many things 
wrong, allowed a dispensation from nearly everything 
that was right, and abrogated the essential principle 
and ground-work of true morality. Still again, it 
was an unhappy thing, that the consolations in sorrow 
and the view of death should either be too feeble to 
animate, or should animate only by deluding. And it 
was the consummation of evil in the state of the peo- 
ple of those dark ages, it was, emphatically to be " de- 
stroyed," that the great doctrines of redemption should 
have been essentially vitiated or formally supplanted, 
so that multitudes of people were betrayed to rest 
their final hopes on a ground unauthorized by the Judge 
of the world. In this most important matter, the 
spiritual authorities might themselves be subjects of 
the fatal delusion in which they held the community ; 
and well they deserved to be so, in judicial retribution 
of their wickedness in imposing on the people, deliber- 
ately and on system, innumerable things which they 
knew to be false. 

We have often mused, and felt a gloom and dreari- 
ness spreading over the mind while musing, on descrip- 
tions of the aspect of a country after a pestilence has 
left it in desolation, or of a region where the people are 
perishing by famine. It has seemed a mournful thing 
to behold, in contemplation, the multitude of lifeless 
forms, occupying in silence the same abodes in which 
they had lived, or scattered upon the gardens, fields, 
and roads ; and then to see the countenances of the 
beings yet languishing in life, looking despair, and im- 
pressed with the signs of approaching death. We have 
even sometimes had the vivid and horrid picture offered 
to our imagination, of a number of human creatures 






ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 69 

shut up by their fellow mortals in some strong hold, 
under an entire privation of sustenance ; and presenting 
each day their imploring, or infuriated, or grimly sullen, 
or more calmly woful countenances, at the iron and 
impregnable gates ; each succeeding day more haggard, 
more perfect in the image of despair ; and after awhile 
appearing each day one fewer, till at last all have sunk. 
Now shall we feel it as a relief to turn in thought, as 
to a sight of less portentous evil, from the inhabitants 
of a country, or from those of such an accursed prison- 
house, thus pining away, to behold the different spec- 
tacle of national tribes, or any more limited portion 
of mankind, on whose minds are displayed the full 
effects of knowledge denied ; who are under the pro- 
cess of whatever destruction it is, that spirits can suf- 
fer from want of the vital aliment to the intelligent 
nature, especially from " a famine of the words of the 
Lord ?" 

To bring the two to a close comparison, suppose the 
case, that some of the persons thus doomed to perish 
in the tower were in the possession of the genuine light 
and consolations of Christianity, perhaps even had ac- 
tually been adjudged to this fate, (no extravagant sup- 
position,) for zealously and persistingly endeavoring 
the restoration of the purity of that religion to the de- 
luded community. Let it be supposed that numbers 
of that community, having conspired to obtain this ad- 
judgment, frequented the precincts of the fortress, to 
see their victims gradually perishing. It would be 
quite in the spirit of the popish superstition, that they 
should believe themselves to have done God service, 
and be accordingly pleased at the sight of the more 
and more deathlike aspect of the emaciated counte- 
nances. The while, they might be themselves in the 
enjoyment of "fulness of bread." We can imagine 



10 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

them making convivial appointments within sight of the 
prison gates, and going from the spectacle to meet at 
the banquet. Or they might delay the festivity, in or- 
der to have the additional luxury of knowing that the 
tragedy was consummated ; as Bishop Gardiner would 
not dine till the martyrs were burnt. — Look at these 
two contemporary situations, that of the persons with 
truth and immortal hope in their spirits, enduring this 
slow and painful reduction of their bodies to dissolu- 
tion, — and that of those who, while their bodies fared 
sumptuously, were thus miserably perishing in soul, 
through its being surrendered to the curse of a delu- 
sion which envenomed it with suclj a deadly malig- 
nity : and say which was the more calamitous predica- 
ment. 

If we have no hesitation in pronouncing, let us con- 
sider whether we have ever been grateful enough to 
God for the dashing in pieces so long since in this land, 
of a system which maintains, to this hour, much of its 
stability over the greater part of Christendom. If we 
regret that certain fragments of it are still held in ven- 
eration here, and that so tedious a length of ages 
should be required, to work out a complete mental res- 
cue from the infatuation which possessed our ancestors, . 
let us at the same time look at the various states of 
Europe, small and great, where this superstition con- 
timies to hold the minds of the people in its odious 
grasp ; and verify to ourselves what we have to be 
thankful for, by thinking what reception our minds: 
would give to an offer of subsistence on their mum- 
meries, masses, absolutions, legends, relics, mediation 
of saints, and corruptions, even to complete reversal: 
of the evangelic doctrines. 

It was, however, but very slowly that the people of 






ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. *71 

our land realized the benefits of the Reformation, glo- 
rious as that event was, regarded as to its progressive 
and its ultimate consequences. Indeed, the thickness 
of the preceding darkness was strikingly manifested by 
the deep shade which still continued stretched over the 
nation, in spite of the newly risen luminary, whose 
beams lost their brightness in pervading it to reach the 
popular mind, and came with the faintness of an ob- 
scured and tedious dawn. 

A long time there lingered enough of night for the 
evil spirit of popery to be at large and in power, not 
abashed, as Milton represents the Evil Angel on his 
being surprised by the guardians of paradise. Rather 
the case was that the vindicator itself of truth and 
holiness, the true Lucifer, shrunk at the rencounter and 
defiance of the old possessor of the gloomy dominion. 
The Reformation was not empowered to speak with a 
voice like that which said, " Let there be light — and 
there was light." Consider what, on its avowed na- 
tional adoption in our land, were its provisions for act- 
ing on the community, and how slow and partial must 
have been their efficacy, for either the dissipation of 
ignorance in general, or the riddance of that worst part 
of it which had thickened round the Romish delusion, 
as malignant a pestilence as ever walked in darkness. 
There was an alteration of formularies, a curtail- 
ment of rites, a declaration of renouncing, in the name 
of the church and state, the most palpable of the ab- 
surdities ; and a change, in some instances of the per- 
sons, but in very many others of the professions mere- 
ly, of the hierarchy. Such were the appointments and 
instrumentality, for carrying an innovation of opinions 
and practices through a nation in which the profound- 
est ignorance and the most inveterate superstition for- 
tified each other. And we may well imagine how fast 



72 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 



and how far they would be effective, to convey infor- 
mation and conviction among a people whose reason 
had been just so much the worse, with respect to reli- 
gion at least, as it had not been totally dormant ; and 
who were too illiterate to be ever the wiser for the vol- 
ume of inspiration itself, had it been in their native lan- 
guage, in every house, instead of being scarcely in one 
house in five thousand. 

Doubtless some advantage was gained through this 
change of institutions, by the abolition of so much of 
the authority of the spiritual despotism as it possessed 
in virtue of being the imperative national establishment. 
And if, under this relaxation of its grasp, a number of 
persons declined and escaped into the new faith, they 
hardly knew how or why, it was happy to make the 
transition on any terms, with however little of the ex- 
ercise of reason, with however little competence to 
exercise it. Well was it to be on the right ground, 
though a man had come thither like one conveyed 
while partly asleep. To have grown to a state of mind 
in which he ceased and refused to worship relics and 
wafers, to rest his confidence on penance and priestly 
absolution, and to regard the Virgin and saints as in 
effect the supreme regency of heaven, was a valuable 
alteration though he could not read, and though he 
could not assign, and had not clearly apprehended, the 
arguments which justified the change. Yes, this would 
be an important thing gained ; but not even thus much 
was gained to the passive slaves of popery but in an 
exceedingly limited extent, during a long course of time 
after it was supplanted as a national institution. It 
continued to maintain in the faith, feelings, and more 
private habits of the people, a dominion little enfeebled 
by the necessity of dissimulation in public observan- 
ces. As far as to secure this exterior show of sub- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. *73 

mission and conformity, it was an excellent argument 
that the state had decreed, and would resolutely en- 
force, a change m religion, — that is to say, till it should 
be the sovereign pleasure of the next monarch, readily 
seconded by a majority of the ecclesiastics, just to turn 
the whole affair round to its former position. 

But the argument would expend nearly its whole 
strength on this policy of saving appearances. For 
what was there conveyed in it that could strike inward 
to act upon the fixed tenets of the mind, to destroy 
there the effect of the earliest and ten thousand subse- 
quent impressions, of inveterate habit and of ancient 
establishment ? "Was it to convince and persuade by 
authority of the maxim, that the government in church 
and state is wiser than the people, and therefore the best 
judge in every matter ? This, as asserted generally, 
was what the people firmly believed: it has always, 
till lately, been the popular faith. But then, was the 
benefit of this obsequious faith to go exclusively to the 
government of just that particular time, — a government 
which, by its innovations and demolitions, was exhibit- 
ing a contemptuous dissent from all past government 
remembered in the land? Were the people not to 
hesitate a moment to take this innovating government's 
word for it that all their forefathers, up through a long 
series of ages, had been fools and dupes in reveren- 
cing, in their time, the wisdom and authority of their 
governors ? The most unthinking and submissive 
would feel that this was too much: especially after 
they had proof that the government demanding so pro- 
digious a concession might, on the substitution of just 
one individual for another at its head, revoke its own 
ordinances, and punish those who should contuma- 
ciously continue to be ruled by them. You summon 
us, they might have said to their governors, at your 
7 



74 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

arbitrary dictate to renounce, as what you are pleased 
to call idolatries and abominations, the faith and rites 
held sacred by twenty generations of our ancestors and 
yours. We are to do this on peril of your highest dis- 
pleasure, and that of God, by whose will you are pro- 
fessing to act ; now who will ensure us that there may 
not be, some time hence, a vindictive inquisition, to find 
who among us have been the most ready of obedience 
to offer wicked insult to the Holy Catholic Apostolic 
Church ? 

This deficiency of the moral power of the govern- 
ment, to promote the progress of conviction in the 
mind of the nation, would be slenderly supplied by the 
authority of the class next to the government in the 
claim to deference, and even holding the precedence in 
actual influence, — that is, the families of rank and con- 
sequence throughout the country. For the people well 
knew, in their respective neighborhoods, that many of 
these had never in reality forsaken the ancient religion, 
consulting only the policy of a time-serving conformity ; 
and that some of them hardly attempted or wished to 
conceal from their inferiors that they preserved their 
fidelity. And then the substituted religion, while it came 
with a great diminution of the pomp which is always 
the delight of the ignorant, acknowledged, — proclaimed 
as one of its chief merits, — a still more fatal defect for 
attracting converts from among beings whose ignorance 
had never been suffered to doubt, till then, that men in 
ecclesiastical garb could modify, or suspend, or defeat 
for them the justice of God; it proclaimed itself unable 
to give any exemptions or commutations in matters of 
conscience. 

When such were the recommendations which the 
new mode of religion had not, and when the recom- 
mendation which it had was simply, (the royal author- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 75 

ity set out of the question,) an offer of evidence to the 
understanding that it teas true, no wonder that many 
of a generation so insensate through ignorance should 
never become its proselytes. But even as to those 
who did, while it was a happy deliverance, as we have 
said, to escape almost any way from the utter gross- 
ness of popery, still they would carry into their better 
faith much of the unhappy effect of that previous men- 
tal debasement. How should a man in the rudeness 
of an intellect left completely ignorant of truth in gen- 
eral, have a luminous apprehension of its most im- 
portant division ? There could not be in men's minds 
a phenomenon similar to what we image to ourselves 
of Goshen in the preternatural night of Egypt, a space 
of perfect light, defined out by a precise limit amidst 
the general darkness. 

Only consider, that the new ideas admitted into the 
proselyte's understanding as the true faith, were to 
take their situation there in nearly those Yery same en- 
compassing circumstances of internal barbarism which 
had been so perfectly commodious to the superstition 
recently dwelling there ; and that which had been 
favorable and adapted in the utmost degree, that which 
had afforded much of the sustenance of life, to the false 
notions, could not but be most adverse to the develop- 
ment of the true ones. These latter, so environed, 
would be in a condition too like that of a candle in the 
mephitic air of a vault. The newly adopted religion, 
therefore, of the uncultivated converts from popery, 
would be far from exhibiting, as compared with the 
renounced superstition, a magnitude of change, and 
force of contrast, duly corresponding to the difference 
between the lying vanities of priestcraft and a commu- 
nication from the living God. The reign of ignorance 
combined with imposture had fixed upon the common 



76 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

people of the age of the Reformation, and of several 
generations downward, the doom of being incapable of 
admitting genuine Christianity but with an excessively- 
inadequate apprehension of its attributes ; — as in the 
patriarchal ages a man might have received with only 
the honors appropriate to a saint or prophet, the visit- 
ant in whom he was entertaining an angel unawares. 
Happy for both that ancient entertainer of such a 
visitant, and the ignorant but honest adopter of the 
reformed religion, when that which they entertained 
rewarded them according to its own celestial quality, 
rather than in proportion to their inadequate reception. 
We may believe that the Divine Being, in special com- 
passion to that ignorance to which barbarism and super- 
stition had condemned inevitably the greater number 
of the early converts to the reformed religion, did ren- 
der that faith beneficial to them beyond the proportion 
of their narrow and still half superstitious conception 
of it. And this is, in truth, the consideration the most 
consolatory in looking back to that tenebrious period 
in which popery was slowly retiring, with a protracted 
exertion of all the craft and strength of an able and 
veteran tyrant contending to the last for prolonged 
dominion. - 

It is, however, no consideration of a portion of the 
people sincere, inquiring, and emerging, though dimly 
enlightened, from the gloom of so dreary a scene, that 
is most apt to occur to our thoughts in extenuation of 
that gloom. Our unreflecting attention allows itself 
to be so engrossed by far different circumstances of that 
period of our history, that we are imposed upon by a 
spectacle the very opposite of mournful. For what is 
it but a splendid and animating exhibition that we be- 
hold in looking back to the age of Elizabeth ? 

And was not that, it may be asked, an age of the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 77 

highest glory to our nation? Why repress our delight 
in contemplating it ? How can we refuse to indulge 
an inspiring sympathy with the energy of those times, 
an ektion of spirit at beholding the unparalleled allot- 
ment of her reign, of statesmen, heroes, and literary 
geniuses, but for whom, indeed, " that bright occidental 
star" would have left no such brilliant track of fame 
behind her ? 

Permit us to answer by inquiring, What should the 
intellectual condition of the people, properly so denom- 
inated, have been in order to correspond in a due 
proportion to the magnificence of these their repre- 
sentative chiefs, and complete the grand spectacle as 
that of a nation ? Determine that ; and then inquire 
what actually was the state of the people all this while. 
There is evidence that it was, what the fatal blight and 
blast of popery might be expected to have left it, gene- 
rally and most wretchedly degraded. What it was is 
shown by the facts, that it was found impossible, even 
under the inspiring auspices of the learned Elizabeth, 
with her constellation of geniuses, orators, scholars, to, 
supply the churches generally with officiating persons 
capable of going with decency through the task of the 
public service, made ready, as every part of it was, to 
their hands ; and that to be able to read, was the very 
marked distinction of here and there an individual. It 
requires little effort but that of going low enough, to 
complete the general estimate in conformity to these 
and similar facts. 

And here we cannot help remarking what a decep- 
tion we suffer to pass on us from history. It celebrates 
some period in a nation's career, as pre-eminently illus- 
trious, for magnanimity, lofty enterprise, literature, 
and original genius. There was, perhaps, a learned 
and vigorous monarch, and there were Cecils and Wal- 
7* 



^8 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

singhams, and Shakspeares and Spensers, and Sidneys 
and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and 
actors, to render it the proudest age of our national 
glory. And we thoughtlessly admit on our imagina- 
tion this splendid exhibition as in some manner in- 
volving or implying the collective state of the people 
in that age ! The ethereal summits of a tract of the 
moral world are conspicuous and fair in the lustre of 
heaven, and we take no thought of the immensely 
greater proportion of it which is sunk in gloom and 
covered with fogs. The general mass of the population, 
whose physical vigor, indeed, and courage, and fidel- 
ity to the interests of the country, were of such admir- 
able avail to the purposes, and under the direction, of 
the mighty spirits that wielded their rough agency, — 
this great assemblage was sunk in such mental bar- 
barism, as to be placed at about the same distance 
from their illustrious intellectual chiefs, as the hordes 
of Scythia from the finest spirits of Athens. It was 
nothing to this debased, countless multitude spread over 
the country, existing in the coarsest habits, destitute, 
in the proportion of thousands to one, of cultivation, 
and still in a great degree enslaved by the popish super- 
stition, — it was nothing to them, in the way of direct 
influence to draw forth their minds into free exercise 
and acquirement, that there were, within the circuit of 
the island, a profound scholarship, a most disciplined 
and vigorous reason, a masculine eloquence, and genius 
breathing enchantment. Both the actual possessors of 
this mental opulence, and the part of society forming, 
around them, the sphere immediately pervaded by the 
delight and instruction imparted by them, might as 
well, for anything they diffused of this luxury and 
benefit among the general multitude, have been a 
Brahminical caste, dissociated by an imagined essential 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 79 

distinction of nature. While they were exulting in 
this elevation and free excursiveness of mental ex- 
istence, the prostrate crowd were grovelling through a 
life on a level with the soil where they were at last to 
find their graves. But this crowd it was that consti- 
tuted the substance of the nation ; to which nation, in 
the mass, the historian applies the superb epithets, which 
a small proportion of the men of that age claimed by a 
striking exception to the general state of the commu- 
nity. History too much consults our love of effect and 
pomp, to let us see in a close and distinct manner 
anything 



and our attention is borne away to the intellectual 
splendor exhibited among the most favored aspirants 
of the seats of learning, or in councils, courts, and 
camps, in heroic and romantic enterprises, and in some 
immortal works of genius. And thus we are gazing 
with delight at a fine public bonfire, while, in all 
the cottages round, the people are shivering for want 
of fuel. 

Our history becomes very bright again with the 
intellectual and literary riches of a much later period, 
often denominated a golden age, — that which was illus- 
trated by the talents of Addison, Pope, Swift, and their 
numerous secondaries in fame ; and could also boast its 
philosophers, statesmen, and heroes. And in the lapse 
of four or five ages, according to the average term of 
human life, since the earlier grand display of mind, 
what had been effected toward such an advancement of 
intelligence in the community, that when this next 
tribe of highly endowed spirits should appear, they 
would stand in much loss opprobrious contrast to the 



80 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

main body of the nation, and find a much larger portion 
of it qualified to receive their intellectual effusions. 
By this time, the class of persons who sought know- 
ledge on a wider scale than what sufficed for the 
ordinary affairs of life, who took an interest in litera- 
ture, and constituted the Authors' Public, had indeed 
extended a little, extremely little, beyond the people of 
condition, the persons educated in learned institutions, 
and those whose professions involved some necessity, 
and might create some taste for reading. Still they 
were a class, and that with a limitation marked and 
palpable, to a degree very difficult for us now to con- 
ceive. They were in contact, on the one side, with 
the great thinkers, moralists, poets, and wits, but very 
slightly in communication with the generality of the 
people on the other. They received the emanations 
from the assemblage of talent and knowledge, but did 
not serve as conductors to convey them down inde- 
finitely into the community. The national body, re- 
garded in its intellectual character, had an inspirited 
and vigorous superior part, as constituted of these men 
of eminent talents and attainments, and this small class 
of persons in a measure assimilated to them in thinking 
and taste ; but it was in a condition resembling that of 
a human frame in which, (through an injury in the 
spinal marrow,) some of the most important functions 
of vitality have terminated at some precise limit down- 
ward, leaving the inferior extremities devoid of sensa- 
tion and the power of action. 

It is on record, that works admirably adapted to find 
readers and to make them, had but an extremely con- 
fined and slowly widening circulation, according to our 
standard of the popular success of the productions of 
distinguished talents. Nor did the writers reckon on 
any such popular success. In the calculations of their 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 81 

literary ambition, it was a thing of course that the 
people went for nothing. It is apparent in allusions to 
the people occurring in these very works, that "the 
lower sort," " the vulgar herd," " the canaille," "the 
mob," u the many-headed beast," " the million," (and 
even these designations generally meant something 
short of the lowest classes of all,) were no more thought 
of in any relation to a state of cultivated intelligence 
than Turks or Tartars. The readers are habitually 
recognized as a kind of select community, conversed 
with on topics and in a language with which the vulgar 
have nothing at all to do, — a converse the more grati- 
fying on that account. And any casual allusions to 
the bulk of the people are expressed in phrases unaf- 
fectedly implying, that they are a herd of beings exist- 
ing on quite other terms and for essentially other ends, 
than we, fine writers, and you, our admiring readers. 
It is evident in our literature of that age, (a feature 
still more prominent in that of France, at the same and 
down to a much later period,) that the main national 
population, accounted as creatures to which souls and 
senses were given just to render their limbs mechani- 
cally serviceable, were regarded by the intellectual 
aristocracy with hardly so active a sentiment as con- 
tempt ; they were not worth that ; it was the easy indif- 
ference toward what was seldom thought of as in 
existence. 

Wickedly wrong as such a feeling was, there is no 
doubt that the actual state of the people was quite such 
as would naturally cause it, in men whose large and 
richly cultivated minds did not contain philanthrophy or 
Christian charity enough to regret and pity the popular 
debasement as a calamity. For while they were in- 
dulging their pride in the elevation, and their taste in 
all the luxuries and varieties, of that ampler higher 



82 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

range of existence enjoyed by such men, in what light 
must they view the bulk of a nation, that knew noth- 
ing of their wit, genius, or philosophy, could not even 
read their writings, but as a coarse mass of living ma- 
terial, the mere earthy substratum of humanity, not to 
be accounted of in any comparison or even relation to 
what man is in his higher style ? While they of that 
higher style were revelling in their mental affluence, 
the vast majority of the inhabitants of the island were 
subsisting, and had always subsisted, on the most beg- 
garly pittance on which mind could be barely kept 
alive. Probably they had at that time still fewer ideas 
than the people of the former age which we have been 
describing. For many of those with which popery had 
occupied the faith and fancy of that earlier generation, 
had now vanished from the popular mind, without be- 
ing replaced in equal number by better ideas, or by 
ideas of any kind. And then their vices had the whole 
grossness of vice, and their favorite amusements were 
at best rude and boisterous, and a large proportion 
of them savage and cruel. So that when we look at 
the shining wits, poets, and philosophers, of that age, 
they appear like gaudy flowers growing in a putrid 
marshy 

And to a much later period this deplorable ignorance, 
with all its appropriate consequences, continued to be 
the dishonor and the plague of the intellectual and 
moral condition of the inhabitants of England. Of 

o 

England ! which had through many centuries made so 
great a figure in Christendom ; which has been so 
splendid in arms, liberty, legislation, science, and all 
manner of literature ; which has boasted its universi- 
ties, of ancient foundation and proudest fame, munifi- 
cently endowed, and possessing, in their accumulations 
of literary treasure, nearly the whole results of all the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 83 

strongest thinking there had been in the world ; and 
which has had also, through the charity of individuals, 
such a number of minor institutions for education, that 
the persons intrusted to see them administered have, 
in very numerous instances, not scrupled to divert their 
resources to total different purposes, lest, perchance, 
the cause of damage to the people should change from 
a lack of knowledge to a repletion of it. Of Eng- 
land ! so long after the Reformation, and all the while 
under the superintendence and tuition of an ecclesias- 
tical establishment for both instruction and jurisdiction, 
co-extended with the entire nation, and furnished for 
its ministry with men from the discipline of institutions 
where everything the most important to be known 
was professed to be taught. Thus endowed had 
England been, thus was she endowed at the period 
under our review, (the former part of the last century,) 
with the facilities, the provisions, the great intellectual 
apparatus, to.be wielded in any mode her wisdom might 
devise, and with whatever strength of hand she chose 
to apply, for promoting her several millions of rational, 
accountable, immortal beings, somewhat beyond a state 
of mere physical existence. When therefore, notwith- 
standing all this, an awful proportion of them were 
under the continual process of destruction for want of 
knowledge, what a tremendous responsibility was borne 
by whatever part of the community it was that stood, 
either by office and express vocation, or by the general 
obligation inseparable from ability, in the relation of 
guardianship to the rest. 

But here the voice of that sort of patriotism which 
is in vogue as well in England as in China, may perhaps 
interpose, to protest against malicious and exaggerated 
invective. As if it were a question of what might be- 



84 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

forehand be reasonably expected, instead of an account 
of what actually exists, it may be alleged that surely it 
is a representation too much against antecedent proba- 
bility to be true, that a civilized, Christian, magnani- 
mous, and wealthy state like that of England, can have 
been so careless and wicked as to tolerate, during the 
lapse of centuries, a hideously gross and degraded con- 
dition of the people. 

But besides that the fact is plainly so, it were vain 
to presume, in confidence on any supposed consistency 
of character, that it must be otherwise. There is no 
saying what a civilized and Christian nation, (so called,) 
may not tolerate. Recollect the Slave Trade, which, 
with the magnitude of a national concern, continued its 
abominations while one generation after another of 
Englishmen passed away ; their intelligence, conscience, 
humanity, and refinement, as quietly accommodated 
to it, as if one portion of the race had possessed 
an express warrant from Heaven to capture, buy, sell, 
and drive another. This is but one of many mortifying 
illustrations how much the constitution of our moral 
sentiments resembles a Manichaean creation, how much 
of them is formed in passive submission to the evil 
principle, acting through prevailing custom ; which de- 
termines that it shall but very partially depend on the 
real and most manifest qualities of things present to 
us, whether we shall have any right perception of their 
characters of good and evil. The agency which works 
this malformation in our sentiments needs no greater 
triumph, than that the true nature of things should be 
disguised to us by the very effect of their being con- 
stantly kept in our sight. Could any malignant en- 
chanter wish for more than this, — to make us insensi- 
ble to the odious quality of things not only though 
they stand constantly and directly in our view, but 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 85 

because they do so ? And while they do so, there may 
also stand as obviously in our view, and close by them, 
the truths which expose their real nature, and might be 
expected to make us instantly revolt from them ; and 
these truths shall be no other than some of the plainest 
principles of reason and religion. It shall be as if 
men of wicked designs could be compelled to wear la- 
bels on their breasts wherever they go, to announce 
their character in conspicuous letters ; or nightly assas- 
sins could be forced to carry torches before them, to 
reveal the murder in their visages ; or, as if, according 
to a vulgar superstition, evil spirits could not help be- 
traying their dangerous presence by a tinge of brim- 
stone in the flame of the lamps. Thus evident, by 
the light of reason and religion, shall have been the 
true nature of certain important facts in the policy of 
a Christian nation ; and nevertheless, even the culti- 
vated part of that nation, during a series of genera- 
tions, having directly before their sight an enormous 
nuisance and iniquity, shall yet never be struck with 
its quality, never be made restless by its annoyance, 
never seriously think of it. And so its odiousness 
shall never be decidedly apprehended till some indi- 
vidual or two, as by the acquisition of a new moral 
sense, receive a sudden intuition of its nature, a dis- 
closure of its whole essence and malignity, — the es- 
sence and malignity of that very thing which has been 
exposing its quality, without the least reserve, by the 
most flagrant siarns, to millions of observers. 

Thus it has been, with respect to the barbarous igno- 
rance under which nine-tenths of the population of our 
country have continued, through a number of ages sub- 
sequent to Ihe Reformation, surrendered to everything 
low, vicious, and wretched. This state of national de- 
basement and dishonor lay spread out, a wide scene of 



86 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

moral desolation, in the sight of statesmen, of dignified 
and subordinate ecclesiastics, of magistrates, of the 
philosophic speculators on human nature, and of all 
those whose rank and opulence brought them hourly 
proofs what great influence they might have, in any 
way in which they should choose to exert it, on the 
people below them. And still it was all right that the 
multitudes, constituting the grand living agency through 
the realm, should remain in such a condition that, when 
they died, the country should lose nothing but so much 
animated body, with the quantum of vice which helped 
to keep it in action. When at length some were be- 
ginning to apprehend and proclaim that all this was 
wrong, these classes were exceedingly slow in their as- 
sent to the reformed doctrine. A large proportion of 
them even declared, on system, against the speculations 
and projects for giving the people, at last, the use and 
value of their souls as well as their hands. The earnest 
and sanguine philanthropists might be pardoned the 
simplicity of not foreseeing such an opposition, though 
they ought, perhaps, to have known better than to be 
surprised at the phenomenon. They were to be made 
wiser by force, with respect to men's governing preju- 
dices and motives. And from credulity mortified is a 
short transit to suspicion. So ungracious a manner of 
having the insight into motives sharpened, does not 
tend to make its subsequent exercise indulgent, when 
it comes to inspect the altered appearances assumed by 
persons and classes who have previously been in de- 
cided opposition. What arguments have prevailed with 
you, (the question might be,) since you have never 
frankly retracted your former contempt of those which 
convinced us ? May any sinister thought have occur- 
red, that you might defeat our ends by a certain way 
of managing the means ? Or do you hope to deter- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 87 

mine and limit to some subordinate purposes, what we 
wish to prosecute for the most general good ? Or 
would you rather impose on yourselves the grievance 
of promoting an object which you dislike, than that we 
should have the chief credit of promoting it ? Do you 
sometimes accompany your working in the vineyard 
with maledictions on those who have reduced you to 
such a necessity ? Would you have been glad to be 
saved the unwelcome service by their letting it alone ? 
Those friends of man and their country who were 
the earliest to combine in schemes for enlightening the 
people, and who continue to prosecute the object on the 
most liberal and comprehensive principle, have to ac- 
knowledge surmises like these. Nevertheless, they are 
willing to forego any shrewd investigation into the 
causes of the later silence and apparent acquiescence of 
former opposers ; and into the motives which have in- 
duced some of them, though in no very amicable mood, 
to take a part in measures tending in their general ef- 
fect to the same end. Whatever were their suspicion 
of those motives, they would be reminded of an exam- 
ple, not altogether foreign to the nature of their busi- 
ness, and quite in point to their duty, — that of the 
magnanimous principle through which the great Apos- 
tle disappointed his adversaries, by finding his own 
triumph in that of his cause, while he saw that cause 
availing itself of these foes after the manner of some 
consummate general, who has had the art to make those 
who have come into the field as but treacherous auxil- 
iaries, co-operate effectually in the battle which they 
never intended he should gain. Some preached Christ 
of envy, and strife, and contention, supposing to add 
affliction to his bonds ; but, says he, What then ? not- 
withstanding every way, whether in pretence or truth, 
Christ is preached — the thing itself is done — and I 



88 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

therein rejoice, yea, and will rejoice. When animated 
by this high principle, this ambition absolutely for the 
cause itself, its servant is a gainer, because it is a gainer, 
by all things convertible into tribute, whatever may be 
the temper or intention of the officers, either as towards 
the cause or towards himself. He may say to them, I 
am more pleased by what you are actually doing, be the 
motive what it will, in advancement of the object to 
which I am devoted, than it is possible for you to ag- 
grieve me by letting me see that you would not be 
sorry for the frustration of my schemes and exertions 
for its service ; or even by betraying, though I should 
lament such a state of your minds, that you would be 
content to sacrifice it if that might be the way to de- 
feat me. 

We revert but for a moment to the review of past 

times. We said that long after the brilliant show 

of talent, and the creation of literary supplies for the 
national use, in the early part of the last century, the 
deplorable mental condition of the people remained in 
no very great degree altered. To pass from beholding 
that bright and sumptuous display, in order to see what 
there was corresponding to it in the subsequent state 
of the popular cultivation, is like going out from some 
magnificent apartment with its lustres, music, refec- 
tions, and assemblage of elegant personages, to be beset 
by beggars in the gloom and cold of a winter night. 

Take a few hours' indulgence in the literary luxuries 
of Addison, Pope, and their secondaries, and then turn 
to some authentic plain representation of the attain- 
ments and habits of the mass of the people, at the time 
when Whitefield and Wesley commenced their invasion 
of the barbarous community. But the benevolent 
reader, (or let him be a patriotically proud one,) is quite 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 89 

reluctant to recognize his country, his celebrated Chris- 
tian nation, " the most enlightened in the world," (as 
song and oratory have it,) in a populace for the far 
greater part as perfectly estranged from the page of 
knowledge, as if printing, or even letters, had never 
been invented ; the younger part finding their supreme 
delight in rough frolic and savage sports, the old sink- 
ing down into impenetrable stupefaction with the de- 
cline of the vital principle. 

If he would eagerly seek to fix on something as a 
counterbalance to this, and endeavor to modify the es- 
timate and relieve the feeling, by citing perhaps the 
courage, and a certain rudimental capacity of good 
sense, in which the people are deemed to have sur- 
passed the neighboring nations, he will be compelled to 
see how these native endowments were overrun and 
befooled by a farrago of contemptible superstitions ; — 
contemptible not only for their stupid absurdity, but 
also as having; in general nothing of that pensive, sol- 
emn, and poetical character which superstition is capa- 
ble of assuming. — It is an exception to be made with 
respect to the northernmost part of the island, that su- 
perstition did there partake of this higher character. 
It seems to have had somewhat of the tone imitated, 
but in a softer mode, in the poetry, denominated of 
Ossian. 

As to religion, there is no hazard in saying, that 
several millions had little further notion of it than that 
it was an occasional, or, in the opinion of perhaps one 
in twenty, a regular appearance at church, hardly tak- 
ing into the account that they were to be taught any- 
thing there. And what were they taught — those of 
them who gave their attendance and attention ? What 
kind of notions it was that had settled in their minds 
under such ministration, would be, so to speak, brought 
8* 



90 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

out, it would be made apparent what they were or were 
not taught, when so strong and general a sensation was 
produced by the irruption among them of the two re- 
formers j list named, proclaiming, as they both did, (not- 
withstanding very considerable differences of secondary 
order,) the principles which had been authoritatively 
declared to be of the essence of Christianity, in that 
model of doctrine which had been appointed to pre- 
scribe and conserve the national faith. If such doc- 
trine had been imparted to a portion of the popular 
mind, even though with somewhat less positive state- 
ment, less copiousness of illustration, and less cogency 
of enforcement than it ought ; if it had been but in 
crude substance fixed in the people's understanding, by 
the ministry of the many thousand authorized instruc- 
tors, who were by their institute solemnly enjoined and 
pledged not to teach a different sort of doctrine, and 
not to fail of teaching this ; if, we repeat, this faith, so 
conspicuously declared in the articles, liturgy, and hom- 
ilies, had been in any degree in possession of the peo- 
ple, they would have recognized its main principles, or 
at least a similarity of principles, in the addresses of 
these two new preachers. They would have done so, 
notwithstanding a peculiarity of phraseology which 
Whitefield and Wesley carried to excess; and notwith- 
standing certain specialities which the latter did not, 
even supposing them to be truths, keep duly subordi- 
nate in exhibiting the prominent essentials of Christian- 
ity. The preaching, therefore, of these men was a test 
of what the people had been previously taught or al- 
lowed to repose in as Christian truth, under the tuition 
of their great religious guardian, the national church. 
What it was or was not would be found, in their hav- 
ng a sense of something like what they had been 
-aught before, or something opposite to it, or some 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 91 

thing altogether foreign and unknown, when they were 
hearing those loud proclaimers of the old doctrines of 
the Reformation. Now then, as carrying with them 
this quality of a test, how were those men received in 
the community ? Why, they were generally received, 
on account of the import of what they said, still more 
than from their zealous manner of saying it, with as 
strong an impression of novelty, strangeness, and con- 
trariety to everything hitherto heard of, as any of our 
voyagers and travellers of discoveiy have been by the 
barbarous tribes who had never before seen civilized 
man, or as the Spaniards on their arrival in Mexico or 
Peru. They might, as the voyagers have done, expe- 
rience every local difference of moral temperament, 
from that which hailed them with acclamations, to that 
which often exploded in a volley of mud and stones ; 
but through all these varieties of greetings, there was 
a strong sense of something then brought before them 
for the first time. " Thou bringest certain strange 
things to our ears," was an expression not more unaf- 
fectedly uttered by any hearer of an apostle, preach- 
ing in a heathen city. And to many of the auditors, it 
was a matter of nearly as much difficulty as it would 
to an inquisitive heathen, and required as new a pos- 
ture of the mind, to attain an understanding of the 
evangelical doctrines, though they were the very same 
which had been held forth by the fathers and martyrs 
of the English Church. 

We have alluded to the violence, which sometimes 
encountered the endeavor to restore these doctrines to 
the knowledge and faith of the people. And if any 
one should have thought that, in the descriptions we 
have been giving, too frequent and willing use has been 
made of the epithet " barbarous," or similar words, as 
if we could have a perverse pleasure in degrading our 



92 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

nation, we would request him to select for himself the 
appropriate terms for characterizing that state of the 
people, in point of sense and civilization, to say nothing 
of religion, which could admit such a fact as this to 
stand in their history — namely, that, in a vast number 
of instances and places, where some person unexcep- 
tionable in character as far as known, and sometimes 
well known as a worthy man, has attempted to address 
a number of the inhabitants, under a roof or under the 
sky, on what it imported them beyond all things in the 
world to know and consider, a multitude have rushed 
together, shouting and howling, raving and cursing, and 
accompanying, in many of the instances, their furious 
cries and yells with loathsome or dangerous missiles ; 
dragging or driving the preacher from his humble 
stand, forcing him, and the few that wished to encour- 
age and hear him, to flee for their lives, sometimes 
not without serious injury before they could escape. 
And that such a history of the people may show how 
deservedly their superiors were denominated their 
"betters," it has to add, that these savage tumults 
were generally instigated or abetted, sometimes under 
a little concealment, but often avowedly, by persons 
of higher condition, and even by those consecrated to 
the office of religious instruction ; and this advantage 
of their station was lent to defend the perpetrators 
against shame, or remorse, or just punishment, for the 
outrage. 

There would be no hazard in affirming, that since 
Wesley and Whitefield began the conflict with the 
heathenism of the country, there have been in it 
hundreds of occurrences answering in substance to this 
description. From any one, therefore, who should be 
inclined to accuse us of harsh language, we may well 
repeat the demand in what terms he would think he 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 93 

gave the true character of a mental and moral con- 
dition, manifested in such uproars of savage violence 
as the Christian missionaries among eastern idolaters 
never had the slightest cause to apprehend. These 
outrages were so far from uncommon, or confined to 
any one part of the country, some time before, and for 
a very long while after, the middle of the last century, 
that they might be fairly taken as indicating the depth 
at which the greatest part of the nation lay sunk in 
ignorance and barbarism. Yet the good and zealous 
men whose lot it was to be thus set upon by a de- 
praved, infuriate rabble, the foremost of them active 
in direct assault, and the rest venting their ferocious 
delight in a hideous blending of ribaldry and execra- 
tion, of joking and cursing, were taxed with a canting 
hypocrisy, or a fanatical madness, for speaking of the 
prevailing ignorance and barbarism in terms equivalent 
to our sentence from the Prophet, "The people are 
destroyed for lack of knowledge," and for deploring 
the hopelessness of any revolution in this empire of 
darkness by means of the existing institutions, which 
seemed indeed to have become themselves its strong- 
holds. 

But they whom serious danger could not deter from 
renewing and indefinitely repeating such attempts at 
all hazards, were little likely to be appalled by these 
contumelies of speech. To the persons so abusing 
them they might coolly reply, " Now really you are 
inconsiderately wasting your labor. Don't you know, 
that on the account of this same business we have sus- 
tained the battery of stones, brickbats, and the contents 
of the ditch? And can you believe we can much care 
for mere words of insult, after that ? Albeit the op- 
probrious phrases have the fetid coarseness befitting 
the bluster of property without education, or the more 



94 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

highly inspirited tone of railing learnt in a college, 
they are quite another kind of thing to be the mark 
for, than such assailments as have come from the 
brawny arms of some of your peasants, set on probably 
by broad hints or plain expressions how much you would 
be pleased with such exploits." — It is gratifying to see 
thus exemplified, in the endurance of evil for a good 
cause, that provision in our nature for economizing the 
expense of feeling, through which the encountering of 
the greater creates a hardihood which can despise the 
less. 

That our descriptive observations do not exaggerate 
the popular ignorance, with its natural concomitants, 
as prevailing at the middle of the last century and far 
downward, many of the elderly persons among us can 
readily confirm, from what they remember of the tes- 
timony of their immediate ancestors. It will be recol- 
lected what pictures they gave of the moral scene 
spread over the country when they were young. They 
could convey lively images of the situations in which 
the vulgar notions and manners had their free display, 
by representing the assemblages, and the fashion of 
discourse and manners, at fairs, revels, and other ren- 
dezvous of amusement; or in the field of rural em- 
ployment, or on the village green, or in front of the 
mechanic's workshop. They could recount various 
anecdotes characteristic of the times ; and repeat short 
dialogues, or single sayings, which expressed the very 
essence of what was to the population of the township 
or province instead of law and prophets, or sages or 
apostles. They could describe how free from all sense 
of shame whole families would seem to be, from grand- 
sires down to the third rude reckless generation, for 
not being able to read ; and how well content, when 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 95 

there was some one individual in the neighborhood 
who could read an advertisement, or ballad, or last 
dying* speech of a malefactor, for the benefit of the 
rest. They could describe the desolation of the land, 
with respect to any enlightening and impressive re- 
ligious instruction in the places of worship ; in the 
generality of which, indeed, the whole spirit and man- 
ner of the service tended to what we just now describ- 
ed as the fact — that religion, in its proper sense, was 
absolutely a thing not recognized at all. To most of 
the persons there the forms attended to were represen- 
tative of litellary nothing — they were themselves the 
all.* And as to those who really did in the course of 
their attendance acquire something assignable as their 
creed, our supposed reporters could tell what wretched 
and delusive notions of religion, or rather instead of 

* None of the anecdotes, that have come down in traditions 
now fading away, are more illustrative of those times, than those 
which show both "people and priest satisfied with the observances 
at church as constituting religion, never thinking of them as but 
the means to teach and inspire it. Such anecdotes must have 
been heard by eveiy one who has conversed much with such 
aged persons as remember the most of former times. Some tra- 
ditions of this kind may be recalled to mind, through similarity 
of character, by hearing such an instance as the following. A 
friend of the writer mentions, that he heard his father, whose 
veracity was above all question, relate as one of the recollections 
of the time when he was a young man, that in the parish church 
where he attended, the service was one Sunday morning per- 
formed with a somewhat unusual despatch, and every abbrevia- 
tion that depended on the discretion of the minister ; who at the 
conclusion explained the circumstance publicly, by saying, that 
as neighbor such-a-one (mentioning the name) was going to bait 
his bull in the afternoon, he had been as short as possible that 
the congregation might have good time for the sport. — It is on 
the same principle that the Catholics on the continent, having 
attended mass in the morning, never think of doubting their 
license for every frivolity the rest of the day. 



96 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

religion, they were permitted and authorized, by their 
appointed spiritual guides, to carry with them to their 
last hour. At which hour, some ceremonial form was 
to be a passport to heaven : a little bread and wine, 
converted into a mysterious object of superstition, by 
receiving an ecclesiastical name of unknown import, 
accompanied with some sentences regarded much in 
the nature of an incantation — and all was safe ! The 
sinner expiring believed so, and the sinners surviving 
were left to go on in their thoughtless way of life, on 
a calculation of the same final resource. 

Thus the past age has left an image of its character 
in the minds of the generation now themselves grown 
old, received by immediate tradition from persons who 
lived in it. Here and there, indeed, there still lingers, 
so long after the departure of the great company to 
which he belonged, an ancient who retains a trace of 
this image immediately from the reality, as having be- 
come of an age to look at the world, and take a. share 
in its activities, about the middle of the last century.* 
And it might be an employment of considerable though 
rather melancholy interest, for a person visiting many 
parts of the land, to put in requisition, in each place, 
for a day or two, the most faithful of the memories of 
the most narrative of the oldest people, for materials 
toward forming an estimate of the mental and moral 
state of the main body of the inhabitants, of town or 
country, in the period of which they themselves saw 
the latter part, and remember it in combination with 
what their progenitors related of the former. After 
these few retainers of the original picture from the life 
shall have left the world, it will be comparatively a 

* They are here supposed to be looking back from about the 
year 1820. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 97 

faint conception that can be formed of that age from 
written memorials, which exist but in a very imperfect 
and scattered state. 

But supposing the scene could be brought back to 
the mental eye, in full verity and distinctness, as in a 
vision supernaturally imparted, are we sure we should 
not have the mortification of perceiving that the change, 
from the condition of the people then to their condition 
now, has been in but poor proportion to the amount 
of the advantages, which we are apt to be elated in 
recounting as the boast and happiness of later times ? 
To assume that we should not, is to impute to that 
former age still more ignorance and debasement than 
appear in the above description. For what could, what 
must that condition have been, if it was worse than 
the present by anything near the difference made by 
what would be a tolerably fair improvement of the ad- 
ditional means latterly afforded ? An estimate being 
made of the measure of intelligence and worth found 
among the descendants, let so much be taken out as 
we would wish to attribute to the effect of the 
additional means, and what will that remainder be 
which is to represent the state of the ancestors, formed 
under a system of means wanting all those which we 
are allowing ourselves to think important enough to 
warrant the frequent expression, " This new era ?" 

The means wanting to the former generation, and 
that have sprung into existence for the latter, may be 
briefly noted ; and those of a religious nature may be . 
named first. It is the most obvious of public expedients, 
that good men who wish to make others so should preach 
to them. And there has been a wonderful extension 
of this practice since the zealous exertions of White- 
field, Wesley, and their co-operators awakened other 
good men to a sense of their capacity and duty. The 
9 



98 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

spirit actuating the associated followers of the latter of 
those two great agitators, has impelled forth their whole 
disposable force (to use a military phrase) to this ser- 
vice ; and they have sent preachers into many parts of 
the land where preaching itself, in any fair sense of the 
term, was wholly a novelty ; and where there was roused 
as earnest a zeal to crush this alarming innovation, as 
the people of Iceland are described to feel on the oc- 
casion of the approach of a white bear to invade their 
folds or poorly stocked pastures.* To a confederacy of 
Christians so well aware of their own strength and 
progress, it may seem a superfluous testimony that they 
are doing incalculable good among our population, more 
good probably than any other religious sect. This tribute 
is paid not the less freely for a material difference in 
theological opinion ; nor for a wish, a quite friendly one, 
that they may admit some little modification of a spirit 
perhaps rather too sectarian in religion, and rather less 
than independent in politics. 

An immense augmentation has been brought to the 
sum of public instruction, by the continually enlarging 
numbers of dissenters of other denominations. Whatever 
may be thought of some of the consequences of the great 
extension of dissent, it will hardly be considered as a cir- 
cumstance tending to prolong the reign of ignorance that 
thus, within the last fifty years, there have been put in 
activity to impart religious ideas to the people not fewer 
(exclusively of the Wesleyans) than several thousand 
.minds that would, under a continuance of the former state 
of the nation, have been doing no such service ; that is to 
say, the service would not have been done at all. Let it 
be considered, too, that the doctrines inculcated as of 
the first importance, in the preaching of far the greatest 
number of them, were exactly those which the Estab- 
* The writer had just been reading that description. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 99 

lished Church avowed in its formularies and disowned 
in its ministry, — one of the circumstances which con- 
tributed the most to make dissenters of the more seriously 
disposed among the people. — It is to be added, that so 
much public activity in religious instruction could not 
be unaccompanied by an increase of exertion in the 
more private methods of imparting it. 

It is another important accession to the enlarged 
system of operations against religious ignorance, that 
a proportion of the Established Church itself has been 
recovered to the spirit of its venerable founders, by the 
progressive formation in it of a zealous evangelical 
ministry; dissenters within their own community, if 
we may believe the constant loud declarations of the 
bulk of that community, and especially of the most 
dignified, learned, and powerful classes in it. But in 
spite of whatever discredit they may suffer from being 
thus disowned, these worthy and useful men have still, 
in their character of clergymen, a material advantage 
above other faithful teachers, for influence on many of 
the people, by being invested with the credentials of 
the ancient institution, from which the popular mind 
has been slow and reluctant in withdrawing its venera- 
tion; and for which that sentiment, when not quite 
extinct, is ready to revive at any manifestation, in it of 
the quickening spirit of the Gospel. We say, if the 
sentiment be not quite extinct ; for we are aware what 
a very large proportion of the people are gone beyond 
the possibility of feeling it any more. But still the 
number is great of those who experience, at this new 
appearance, a reanimation of their affection for the 
Church ; and so fondly identify the partial change with 
the whole institution, that they feel as if a parent, who 
had for a long while neglected or deserted them, but for 
whom they could never cease to cherish a filial regard, 



100 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

were beginning to be restored to them, with a renewal 
of the benignant qualities and cares of the parental 
character. 

Thus far the account of the means which England 
was not to furnish for its people till the latter part of 
the eighteenth century, relates to their better instruc- 
tion in religion. This will not be thought beside the 
purpose of an enumeration of expedients for lessening 
their ignorance, by any one who can allow that religion, 
regarded as a subject of the understanding, is the most 
important part of knowledge, and who has observed the 
fact that religion, when it begins to interest uncultivated 
minds, works surprisingly in favor of the intellectual 
faculties ; an effect exactly the reverse of that of super- 
stition, and produced by the contrary operation ; for 
while superstition represses, and even curses any free 
action of the intellect, genuine religion both requires 
and excites it. Though it is too true that the great 
Christian principles, when embraced with conviction 
and seriousness by a very uneducated man, must greatly 
partake, by contractedness of apprehension, the ill for- 
tune which has confined his mental growth, yet they 
will often do more than any other thing within the 
same space of time to avenge him of it. 

In addition to the great extension of instruction in 
a form specifically religious, there have been various 
causes and means contributing to the increase of know- 
ledge among the people. After it had been seen for 
centuries in what manner the children of the poor were 
suffered to spend the Sunday, it struck one observer at 
last, that they might on that day be taught to read ! — a 
possibility which had never been suspected ; a disclosure 
as of some hitherto hidden power of nature. And then 
the schools which taught the children to read made some 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 101 

of the parents so much better pleased with their children 
for their first steps in so new an attainment, that they 
could not be indifferent to the opening of other schools 
of a humble order to continue that instruction through 
the week. It was within the same period that there 
was a large circulation of tracts, by some of which many 
who might be little desirous of instruction, were beguiled 
into it by the amusing vehicle ingeniously contrived to 
convey it ; and the most popular of which will remain 
a monument of the talent, knowledge, and benevolence, 
of that distinguished benefactor of her country and 
age, Mrs. H. More, perhaps even pre-eminent above 
her many excellent works in a higher strain. Later 
and continual issues of this class of papers, of every 
diversity of composition, and diffused by the activity 
of numberless hands, have solicited perhaps a fourth 
part of the thoughtless beings in the nation to make at 
least one short effort to think. 

The enormous flight of periodical miscellanies, and 
of newspapers, must be taken as both the indication 
and the cause that hundreds of thousands of persons 
were giving some attention to the matters of general 
information, where their grandfathers had been, during 
the intervals of time allowed by their employments, 
prating, brawling, sleeping, or drinking their hours 
away.* 

It is perhaps an item of some small value in the ac- 



* Since this was written there has been a prodigious augmen- 
tation of all such means of general excitement ; and happily a 
diversified multiplication of a class of them calculated to benefit 
the inferior people, at once by giving them a new and enlarged 
range of ideas, and by bringing them on some tracts of common 
ground with the liberally educated ; thus abating the former almost 
total incapacity, on the part of those inferiors, for intelligent in- 
tercommunication. 

9* 



102 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

count, that a new class of ideas was furnished by the 
many wonderful effects of science, in the application of 
the elements and mechanical powers. The people saw 
human intelligence so effectually inspiriting inanimate 
matter, as to create a new and mighty order of agency, 
appearing in a certain degree independent of man him- 
self, and in its power immensely surpassing any simple 
immediate exertion of his power. They saw wood and 
iron, fire, water, and air, actuated to the production of 
effects which might vie with what their rude ancestors 
had been accustomed to believe, (those of them who 
had heard of such beings,) of giants, magicians, alchy- 
mists, and monsters ; effects, the dream of which, if 
any one could so have dreamed, would have been 
scoffed at by even the more intelligent of the former 
race. 

It is true that very ignorant persons can wonder at 
such things without deriving much instruction from 
them ; and that much sooner than the more cultivated 
ones they become so familiarized with them as not to 
think of them. All effects, however astonishing, are 
apt, if they are but regular in their recurrence, to be- 
come soon insignificant to those who have never learnt 
to inquire into causes. But still, it would be some 
little advantage to the people's understanding to see 
what prodigious effects could be produced without any 
preternatural interference. Though not comprehending 
the science employed, they could comprehend that what 
they saw was purely a matter of science, and that the 
cause and the effect were natural and definite ; unlike 
the present race of Egyptians, who not long since re- 
garded the very mechanics of an European as an ope- 
ration of magic ; and were capable of suspecting that 
a machine constructed by a man from England, for 
raising water from the Nile, should inundate the coun- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 103 

try in an hour. These, wonders of science and art 
must therefore have contributed somewhat to rid our 
people of the impression of being at every turn beset 
by occult powers, under the name perhaps of witch- 
craft, and to expel the notions of a vague and capri- 
cious agency interfering and sporting with events 
throughout the system around them. Their rational- 
ity thus obtained an improvement, which may be set 
against the injury undoubtedly done them through 
that diminished exercise of the understanding which 
accompanied the progressive division of labor ; an al- 
teration rendered inevitable, and in other respects so 
advantageous. 

When we come down to a comparatively recent time, 
we see the Bible "going up on the breadth of the 
land." In passing by any given number of houses of 
the inferior class, we may presume there are in them 
four or five times as many copies of that sacred book 
as there were in the same number thirty or forty years 
since. And when we consider how many more persons 
in those houses can read, and that in some of them the 
book may be more read for having come there as a 
novelty, than it is in many others where it has been an 
old article of the furniture, we may fairly presume that 
the increased reading is in a greater proportion than 
the increased number of Bibles. — This late period has 
also brought into action a new expedient, worthy to 
stand, in the province of education, parallel and rival 
to the most useful modern inventions in the mechanical 
departments ; an organization for schools, by which, 
instead of one or two overlabored agents upon a mass 
of reluctant subjects, that whole mass itself shall be 
animated into a system of reciprocal agency. It has all 
the merit of a contrivance which associates with mental 
labor a pleasure never known to young learners before. 



104 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

One more distinction of our times has been, that 
effect which missionary and other philanthropic socie- 
ties have had, to render familiar to common knowledge, 
by means of their meetings and publications, a great 
number of such interesting and important facts, in the 
state of other countries and our own, as were formerly 
quite beyond the sphere of ordinary information. 

In aid of all these means at work in the trial to raise 
the people from the condition in which they had been 
so many ages sunk and immovable, there has been of 
late years the unpretending but important ministration 
of an incessant multifarious inventiveness in making 
almost every sort of information offer itself in brief, 
familiar, and attractive forms, adapted to youth or to 
adult ignorance ; so that knowledge, which was for- 
merly a thing to be searched and dug for " as for hid 
treasures," has seemed at last beginning to effloresce 
through the surface of the ground on all sides of us. 

The statement of what recent times have produced 
for effecting an alteration among the people, must 
include the prodigious excitement in the political world. 
It were absurd, it is true, to name this in the simple 
character of a cause, when we speak of the rousing of 
the popular mind from a long stagnation ; it being itself 
a proof and result of some preceding cause beginning 
to pervade and disturb that stagnation. But whatever 
may be assigned as the true and sufficient explanation 
of its origin, we have to look on the mighty operation 
of its progress, forcing a restlessness, instability, and 
tendency to change, into almost every part of the social 
economy. In the whole compass of time there has 
been no train of events, that has within so short a 
period stirred to the very bottom the mind of so vast 
a portion of the race. And the power of this great 
commotion has less consisted in what may be termed 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 105 

its physical energy, evinced in grand exploits and ca- 
tastrophes, than in its being an intense activity of 
principles. It was as different from other convulsions 
in the moral world, as would be a tempest attributed 
to the direct intervention of a mighty spirit, whether 
believed celestial or infernal, from one raised in the 
elements by mere natural causes. The people were 
not, as in other instances of battles, revolutions, and 
striking alternations of fortune, gazing a at mere show 
of wonderful events, but regarded these events as the 
course of a great practical debate of questions affecting 
their own interests. 

And now, when we have put all these things together, 
we may well pause to indulge again our wonder what 
could have been the mental situation of a majority of 
the inhabitants of this country, antecedently to this 
creation and conjunction of so many means and influ- 
ences for awaking them to something of an intelligent 
existence. 



SECTION III. 



The review of the past may here be terminated. 
And how welcome a change it would be if we might 
here completely emerge from the gloom which has 
overspread it. How happy were it if in proceeding to 
an estimate of the people of the present times, we 
found so rich a practical result of the means for form- 
ing a more enlightened race, that we should have no 
further recollection of that sentence from the Prophet, 
which has hitherto suggested itself again at every step 
in prosecution of the survey. But we are compelled to 
see how slow is the progress of mankind toward thus 
rendering obsolete any of the darker lines of the sacred 
record. So completely, so desperately, had the whole 
popular body and being been pervaded by the stupify- 
ing power of the long reign of ignorance, with such 
heavy reluctance, at the best, does the human mind 
open its eyes to admit light, — and so incommensurate 
as yet, even on the supposition of its having much less 
of this reluctance, has been in quantity the whole new 
supply of means for a happy change, — that a most 
melancholy spectacle still abides before us. Time, in 
sweeping away successive generations, has preserved, 
in substance, the sad inheritance to that which is as yet 
the latest. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 107 

Even that portion of beneficial effect which actually 
has resulted from this co-operation of new forces, has 
served to make a more obvious exposure of the unhap- 
piness and offensiveness of what is still the condition of 
the far greater part of our population ; as a dreary 
waste is made to give a more sensible impression how 
dreary it is, by the little inroads of cultivation and 
beauty in its hollows, and the faint advances of an un- 
wonted green upon its borders. The degradation of 
the main body of the lower classes is exposed by a 
comparison with the small reclaimed portion within 
those classes themselves. It is not with the philoso- 
phers, literati, and most accomplished persons in higher 
life, that we should think of placing in immediate com- 
parison the untutored rustics and workmen in stones and 
timber, for the purpose of showing how much is want- 
ing to them. These extreme orders of society would 
seem less related in virtue of their common nature, than 
separated by the wide disparity of its cultivation. They 
would appear so immeasurably asunder, such antipodes 
in the sphere of human existence, that the state of the 
one could afford no standard for judging of the defects 
or wants of the other. It was not in a speculation which 
amused itself, as with a curious fact, in seeing that the 
same material can be made into scholars, legislators, 
sages, and models of elegance — and also into helots ; 
and then went into a fanciful question of how near they 
might possibly be brought together : it was in a specu- 
lation which, instead of dwelling on the view of what 
was impossible to the common people in a comparative 
reference to the highest classes of their fellow-men, 
considered what was left practicable to them within 
their own narrow allotment, that the schemes originated 
which have actually imparted to a proportion of them 
an invaluable share of the benefits of knowledge. There 



108 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

has thus been formed a small improved order of people 
amidst the multitude ; and it is the contrast between 
these and the general state of that multitude that most 
directly exposes the popular debasement. It certainly 
were ridiculous enough to fix on a laboring man and his 
family, and affect to deplore that he is doomed not to 
behold the depths and heights of science, not to expa- 
tiate over the wide field of history, not to luxuriate 
among the delights, refinements, and infinite diversities 
of literature ; and that his family are not growing up in 
a training to every high accomplishment, after the pat- 
tern of some family in the neighborhood, favored by 
fortune, and high ability and cultivation in those at their 
head. But it is a quite different thing to take this man 
and his family, hardly able, perhaps, even to read, and 
therefore sunk in all the grossness of ignorance, — and 
compare them with another man and family in the same 
sphere of life, but who have received the utmost im- 
provement within the reach of that situation, and are 
sensible of its value ; who often employ the leisure 
hour in reading, (sometimes socially and with intermin- 
gled converse,) some easy work of instruction or inno- 
cent entertainment ; are detached, in the greatest degree 
that depends on their choice, from society with the ab- 
solute vulgar ; have learnt much decorum of manners ; 
can take an intelligent interest in the great events of 
the world ; and are prevented, by what they read 
and hear, from forgetting that there is another world. 
It is, we repeat, after thus seeing what may, and in 
particular instances does exist, in a humble condition, 
that we are compelled to regard as really a dreadful 
spectacle the still prevailing state of our national popu- 
lation. 

We shall endeavor to exhibit, though on a small 
scale, and perhaps not with a very strict regularity of 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 109 

proportion and arrangement, a faithful representation 
of the most serious of the evils conspicuous in an un- 
educated state of the people. Much of the description 
and reflections must be equally applicable to other 
countries ; for spite of all their mutual antipathies and 
hostilities, and numberless contrarieties of customs and 
fashions, they have been wonderfully content to resem- 
ble one another in the worst national feature, a deformed 
condition of their people. But it is here at home that 
this condition is the most painfully forced on our atten- 
tion ; and here also of all the world it is, that such a 
wretched exhibition is the severest reproach to the 
nation for having suffered its existence. 

The subject is to the last degree unattractive, except 
to a misanthropic disposition ; or to that, perhaps, of a 
stern theological polemic, when tempted to be pleased 
with every superfluity of evidence for overwhelming 
the opposers of the doctrine which asserts the radical 
corruption of our nature. As spread over a coarse 
and repulsive moral and physical scenery, it is a subject 
in the extreme of contrast with that susceptibility of 
magnificent display, on account of which some of the 
most cruel evils that have preyed on mankind have 
ever been favorite themes with writers ambitious to 
shine in description. Nor does it present a wild and 
varying spectacle, where a crowd of fantastic shapes 
(as in a view of the pagan superstitions,) may stimulate 
and beguile the imagination though we know we are 
looking on a great evil. It is a gloomy monotony ; 
Death without his dance. Moreover, the representa- 
tion which exhibits one large class degraded and unhap- 
py, reflects ungraciously, and therefore repulsively, by 
an imputation of neglect of duty, on the other classes 
who are called upon to look at the spectacle. There 
is, besides, but little power of arresting the attention in 
10 



110 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

a description of familiar matter of fact, plain to every 
one's observation. Yet ought it not to be so much the 
better, when we are pleading for a certain mode of 
benevolent exertion, that every one can see, and that 
no one can deny, the sad reality of all that forms the 
object, and imposes the duty, of that exertion? 

Look, then, at the neglected ignorant class in their 
childhood and youth. One of the most obvious circum- 
stances is the perfect non-existence in their minds of any 
notion or question what their life is for, taken as a whole. 
Among a crowd of trifling and corrupting ideas that 
soon find a place in them, there is never the reflective 
thought, — For what purpose am I alive ? What is it 
that I should be, more than the animal that I am? 
Does it signify what I may be ? — But surely, it is with 
ill omen that the human creature advances into life 
without such a thought. He should in the opening of 
his faculties receive intimations, that something more 
belongs to his existence than what he is about to-day, 
and what he may be about to-morrow. He should be 
made aware that the course of activity he is beginning 
ought to have a leading principle of direction, some 
predominant aim, a general and comprehensive purpose, 
paramount to the divers particular objects he may pur- 
sue. It is not more necessary for him to understand 
that he must in some way be employed in order to live, 
than to be apprized that life itself, that existence itself, 
is of no value but as a mere capacity of something 
which he should realize, and of which he may fail. He 
should be brought to apprehend that there is a some- 
thing essential for him to he, which he will not become 
merely by passing from one day into another, by eating 
and sleeping, by growing taller and stronger, seizing 
what share he can of noisy sport, and performing ap- 
pointed portions of work ; and that if he do not become 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. Ill 

that which he cannot become without a general and 
leading purpose, he will be worthless and unhappy. 

We are not entertaining the extravagant fancy that 
it is possible, except in some rare instances of prema- 
ture thoughtf ulness, to turn inward into deep habitual 
reflection, the spirit that naturally goes outward in 
these vivacious, active, careless beings, when we assert 
that it is possible to teach many of them with a degree 
of success, in very juvenile years, to apprehend and ad- 
mit somewhat of such a consideration. We have many 
times seen this exemplified in fact. We have found 
some of them appearing apprized that life is for some- 
thing as a whole ; and that, to answer this general pur- 
pose, a mere succession of interests and activities, each 
gone into for its own sake, will not suffice. They could 
comprehend, that the multiplicity of interests and ac- 
tivities in detail, instead of constituting of themselves 
the purpose of life, were to be regarded as things sub- 
ordinate and subservient to a general scope, and judged 
of, selected, and regulated, in reference and amenable- 
ness to it. — By the presiding comprehensive purpose, 
we do not specifically and exclusively mean a direction 
of the mind to the religious concern, viewed as a sepa- 
rate affair, and in contradistinction to other interests ; 
but a purpose formed upon a collective notion of the 
person's interests, which shall give one general right 
bearing to the course of his life ; an aim proceeding in 
fulfilment of a scheme, that comprehends and combines 
with the religious concern all the other concerns for 
the sake of which it is worth while to dispose the ac- 
tivities of life into a plan of conduct, instead of leaving 
them to custom and casualty. The scheme will look 
and guide toward ultimate felicity: but will at the 
same time take large account of what must be thought 



112 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of, and what may be hoped for, in relation to the pres- 
ent life. 

Now, we no more expect to find any such idea of a 
presiding purpose of life, than we do the profoundest 
philosophical reflection, in the minds of the uneducated 
children and youth. They think nothing at all about 
their existence and life in any moral or abstracted or 
generalizing reference whatever. They know not any 
good that it is to have been endowed with a rational 
rather than a brute nature, excepting that it affords 
more diversity of action, and gives the privilege of tyr- 
annizing over brutes. They think nothing about what 
they shall become, and very little about what shall be- 
come of them. There is nothing that tells them of the 
relations for good and evil, of present things with fu- 
ture and remote ones. The whole energy of their 
moral and intellectual nature goes out as in brute in- 
stinct on present objects, to make the most they can of 
them for the moment, taking the chance for whatever 
may be next. They are left totally devoid even of the 
thought, that what they are doing is the beginning of 
a life as an important adventure for good or evil ; their 
whole faculty is engrossed in the doing of it ; and whe- 
ther it signify anything to the next ensuing stage of 
life, or to the last, is as foreign to any calculation of 
theirs, as the idea of reading their destiny in the stars. 
Not only, therefore, is there an entire preclusion from 
their minds of the faintest hint of a monition, that they 
should live for the grand final object pointed to by re- 
ligion, but also, for the most part, of all consideration 
of the attainment of a reputable condition and charac- 
ter in life. The creature endowed with faculties for 
" large discourse, looking before and after," capable of 
so much design, respectability, and happiness, even in 
its present short stage, and entering on an endless 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 113 

sareer, is seen in the abasement of snatching, as its ut- 
most reach of purpose, at the low amusements, blend- 
ed with vices, of each passing day ; and cursing its 
privations and tasks, and often also the sharers of those 
privations, and the exactors of those tasks. 

When these are grown up into the mass of mature 
population, what will it be, as far as their quality shall 
go toward constituting the quality of the whole ? Alas ! 
it will be, to that extent, just a continuation of the ig- 
norance, debasement, and misery, so conspicuous in the 
bulk of the people now. And to ivhat extent? Cal- 
culate that from the unquestionable fact, that hun- 
dreds of thousands of the human beings in our land, 
between the ages, say of six and sixteen, are at this 
hour thus abandoned to go forward into life at random, 
as to the use they shall make of it, — if, indeed, it can 
be said to be at random, when there is strong tendency 
and temptation to evil, and no discipline to good. Look- 
ing at this proportion, does any one think there will be, 
on the whole, "wisdom and virtue enough in the com- 
munity to render this black infusion imperceptible or 
innoxious ? 

But are we accounting it absolutely inevitable that 
the sequel must be in full proportion to this present 
fact, — must be everything that this fact threatens, and 
can lead to, — as we should behold persons carried down 
in a mighty torrent, where all interposition is impossi- 
ble, or as the Turks look at the progress of a conflagra- 
tion or an epidemic ? It is in order to " frustrate the 
tokens" of such melancholy divination, to arrest some- 
thing of what a destructive power is in the act of car- 
rying away, to make the evil spirit find, in the next 
stages of his march, that all his enlisted host have not 
followed him, and to quell somewhat of the triumph 
of his boast, " My name is legion, for we are many ;" 
10* 



114 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

— it is for this that the friends of improvement, and of 
mankind, are called upon for efforts greatly beyond 
those which are requisite for maintaining in its present 
extent of operation the system of expedients for inter- 
cepting, before it be too late, the progress of so large a 
portion of the youthful tribe toward destruction. 

Another obvious circumstance in the state of the un- 
taught class is, that they are abandoned, in a direct, un- 
qualified manner, to seize recklessly whatever they can of 
sensual gratification. The very narrow scope to which 
their condition limits them in the pursuit of this, will 
not prevent its being to them the most desirable thing 
in existence, when there are so few other modes of 
gratification which they either are in a capacity to en- 
joy, or have the means to obtain. By the very con- 
stitution of the human nature, the mind seems half to 
belong to the senses, it is so shut within them, affected 
by them, dependent on them for pleasure, as well as for 
activity, and impotent but through their medium. And 
while, by this necessary hold which they have on what 
would call itself a spiritual being, they absolutely will 
engross to themselves, as of clear right, a large share 
of its interest and exercise, they will strive to possess 
themselves of the other half too. And they will have 
it, if it has not been carefully otherwise claimed and 
pre-occupied. And when the senses have thus usurped 
the whole mind for their service, how will you get any 
of it back ? Try, if you will, whether this be a thing 
so easy to be done. Present to the minds so engrossed 
with the desires of the senses, that their main action is 
but in these desires and the contrivances how to fulfil 
them, — offer to their view nobler objects, which are ap- 
propriate to the spiritual being, and observe whether 
that being promptly shows a sensibility to the worthier 
objects, as congenial to its nature, and, obsequious to 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 115 

the new attraction, disengages itself from what has 
wholly absorbed it. 

Nor would we require that the experiment be made 
by presenting something of a precisely religious nature, 
to which there is an innate aversion on account of its 
divine character, separately from its being an intellec- 
tual thing, — an aversion even though the mental facul- 
ties be cultivated. It may be made with something 
that ought to have power to please the mind as simply 
a being of intelligence, imagination, and sentiment, — a 
pleasure which, in some of its modes, the senses them- 
selves may intimately partake ; as when, for instance, 
it is to be imparted by something beautiful or grand in 
the natural world, or in the works of art. Let this re- 
fined solicitation be addressed to the grossly uncultiva- 
ted, in competition with some low indulgence — with the 
means, for example, of gluttony and inebriation. See 
how the subjects of your experiment, (intellectual and 
moral, natures though they are,) answer to these re- 
spective offered gratifications. Observe how these 
more dignified attractives encounter and overpower the 
meaner, and reclaim the usurped, debased' spirit. Or 
rather, observe whether they can avail for more than 
an instant, so much as to divide its attention. But in- 
deed you can foresee the result so well, that you may 
spare the labor. Still less could you deem it to be of 
the nature of an experiment, (which implies uncer- 
tainty,) to make the attempt with ideal forms of noble- 
ness or beauty, with intellectual, poetical, or moral cap- 
tivations. 

Yet this addiction to sensuality, beyond all competi- 
tion of worthier modes and means of interest, does not 
altogether refuse to admit of some division and diver- 
sion of the vulgar feelings, in favor of some things of a 
more mental character, provided they be vicious. A 



116 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

man so neglected in his youth that he cannot spell the 
names of Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon, or read them 
if he see them spelt, may feel the strong incitement of 
ambition. This, instead of raising him, may only pro- 
pel him forward on the level of his debased condition 
and society; and it is a favorable supposition that 
makes him " the best wrestler on the green," or a man- 
ful pugilist; for it is probable his grand delight may be, 
to indulge himself in an oppressive, insolent arrogance 
toward such as are unable to maintain a strife with him 
on terms of fair rivalry, making his will the law to all 
whom he can force or frighten into submission. 

Coarse sensuality admits, again, an occasional com- 
petition of the gratifications of cruelty ; a flagrant char- 
acteristic, generally, of uncultivated degraded human 
creatures, both where the whole community consists of 
such, as in barbarian and savage tribes, and where they 
form a large portion of it, as in this country. — It is 
hardly worth while to put in words the acknowledg- 
ment of the obvious and odious fact, that a considerable 
share of mental attainment is sometimes inefficient to 
extinguish, or even repress, this infernal principle of 
human nature, by which it is gratifying to witness and 
inflict suffering, even separately from any prompting of 
revenge. But why do we regard such examples as 
peculiarly hateful, and brand them with the most in- 
tense reprobation, but because it is judged the fair and 
natural tendency of mental cultivation to repress that 
principle, insomuch that its failure to do so is considered 
as evincing a surpassing virulence of depravity ? Every 
one is ready with the saying of the ancient poet, that 
liberal acquirements suppress ferocious propensities. 
But if the whole virtue of such discipline may prove 
insufficient, think what must be the consequence of its 
being almost wholly withheld, so that the execrable 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 117 

propensity may go into action with its malignity unmiti- 
gated, unchecked, by any remonstrance of feeling or 
taste, or reason or conscience. 

And such a consequence is manifest in the lower 
ranks of our self-extolled community ; notwithstanding 
a diminution, which the progress of education and re- 
ligion has slowly effected, in certain of the once most 
favorite and customary practices of cruelty ; what we 
might denominate the classic games of the rude popu- 
lace. These very practices, nevertheless, still keep 
their ground in some of the more heathenish parts of 
the country ; and if it were possible, that the more im- 
proved notions and taste of the more respectable classes 
could admit of any countenance being given to their 
revival in the more civilized parts, it would be found 
that, even there, a large portion of the people is to this 
hour left in a disposition which would welcome the re- 
turn of savage exhibitions. It may be, that some of 
the most atrocious forms and degrees of cruelty would 
not please the greater number of them ; there have been 
instances in which an English populace has shown in- 
dignation at extreme and unaccustomed perpetrations, 
sometimes to the extent of cruelly revenging them ; 
very rarely, however, when only brute creatures have 
been the sufferers. Not many would be delighted with 
such scenes as those which, in the Place de Greve, used 
to be a gratification to a multitude of all ranks of the 
Parisians. But how many odious facts, characteristic 
of our people, have come under every one's observation* 

Who has not seen numerous instances of the delight 
with which advantage is taken of weakness or simpli- 
city, to practise upon them some sly mischief, or inflict 
some open mortification ; and of the unrepressed glee 
with which the rude spectators can witness or abet the 
malice ? And if, in such a case, an indignant observer 



118 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

has hazarded a remark or expostulation, the full stare, 
and the quickly succeeding laugh and retort of brutal 
scorn, have thrown open to his revolting sight the state 
of the recess within, where the moral sentiments are ; 
and shown how much the perceptions and notions had 
been indebted to the cares of the instructor. Could he 
help thinking what was deserved somewhere, by in- 
dividuals or by the local community collectively, for 
suffering a being to grow up to quite or nearly the com- 
plete dimensions and features of manhood, with so vile 
a thing within it in substitution for what a soul should 
be ? We need not remark, what every one has noticed, 
how much the vulgar are amused by seeing vexatious 
or injurious incidents, (if only not quite disastrous or 
tragical,) befalling persons against whom they can have 
no resentment ; how ferocious often their temper and 
means of revenge when they have causes of resentment ; 
or how intensely delighted, (in company, it is true, with 
many that are called their betters,) in beholding several 
of their fellow-mortals, whether in anger or athletic 
competition, covering each other with bruises, defor- 
mity, and blood. 

Our institutions, however, protect, in some consid- 
erable degree, man against man, as being framed in a 
knowledge of what would else become of the commu- 
nity. But observe a moment what are the dispositions 
of the vulgar as indulged, and with no preventive in- 
terference of those institutions, on the inferior animals. 
To a large proportion of this class it is, in their youth, 
one of the most vivid exhilarations to witness the ter- 
rors and anguish of living beings. In many parts of 
the country it would be no improbable conjecture in 
explanation of a savage yell heard at a distance, that 
a company of rationals may be witnessing the writh- 
ings, agonies, and cries, of some animal struggling for 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 119 

escape or for life, while it is suffering the infliction, per- 
haps, of stones, and kicks, or wounds by more directly- 
fatal means of violence. If you hear in the clamor a 
sudden burst of fiercer exultation, you may surmise 
that just then a deadly blow has been given. There is 
hardly an animal on the whole face of the country, of 
size enough, and enough within reach to be a marked 
object of attention, that would not be persecuted to 
death if no consideration of ownership interposed. 
The children of the uncultivated families are allowed, 
without a check, to exercise and improve the hateful 
disposition, on flies, young birds, and other feeble and 
harmless creatures ; and they are actually encouraged 
to do it on what, under the denomination of vermin, 
are represented in the formal character of enemies, 
almost in such a sense as if a moral responsibility be- 
longed to them, and they were therefore not only to be 
destroyed as a nuisance, but deserving to be punished 
as offenders. 

The hardening against sympathy, with the conse- 
quent carelessness of inflicting pain, combined as this 
will probably be, with the love of inflicting it, must be 
confirmed by the horrid spectacle of slaughter ; a spec- 
tacle sought for gratification by the children and youth 
of the lower order ; and in many places so publicly 
exhibited that they cannot well avoid seeing it, and 
its often savage" preliminary circumstances, sometimes 
directly wanton aggravations ; perhaps in revenge of a 
struggle to resist or escape, perhaps in a rage at the 
awkward manner in which the victim adjusts itself to 
a convenient position for suffering. Horrid, we call 
the prevailing practice, because it is the infliction, on 
millions of sentient and innocent creatures every year, 
in what calls itself a humane and Christian nation, of 
anguish unnecessary to the purpose. Unnecessary — 



120 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

what proof is there to the contrary ? — To what is the 
present practice necessary ?— Some readers will remem- 
ber the benevolent (we were going to say humane, but 
that is an equivocal epithet,) attempt made a number 
of years since by Lord Somerville to introduce, but he 
failed, a mode of slaughter, without suffering ; a mode 
in use in a foreign nation with which we should deem 
it very far from a compliment to be placed on a level 
in point of civilization. And it is a flagrant dishonor to 
such a country, and to the class that virtually, by rank, 
and formally, by official station, have presided over its 
economy, one generation after another, that so hideous 
a fact should never, as far as we know, have been 
deemed by the highest state authorities worth even a 
question whether a mitigation might not be practicable. 
An inconceivable daily amount of suffering, inflicted on 
unknown thousands of creatures, dying in slow an- 
guish, when their death might be without pain as being 
instantaneous, is accounted no deformity in the social 
system, no incongruity with the national profession of 
religion of which the essence is charity and mercy, 
nothing to sully the polish, or offend the refinement, of 
what demands to be accounted, in its higher portions, 
a pre-eminently civilized and humanized community. 
Precious and well protected polish and refinement, and 
humanity, and Christian civilization ! to which it is a 
matter of easy indifference to know that, in the neigh- 
borhood of their abode, those tortures of butchery are 
unnecessarily inflicted, which could not be actually 
witnessed by persons in whom the pretension to these 
fine qualities is anything better than affectation, with- 
out sensations of horror; which it would ruin the 
character of a fine gentleman or lady to have voluntarily 
witnessed in a single instance. 

They are known to be inflicted, and yet this is a 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 121 

trifle not worth an effort toward innovation on invete- 
rate custom, on the part of the influential classes ; who 
may be far more worthily intent on a change in the 
fashion of a dress, or possibly some new refinement in 
the cookery of the dead bodies of the victims. Or the 
living bodies ; as we are told that the most delicious 
preparation of an eel for exquisite palates is to thrust 
the fish alive into the fire : while lobsters are put into 
water gradually heated to boiling. The latter, indeed, 
is an old practice, like that of crimping another fish. 
Such things are allowed or required to be done by per- 
sons pretending to the highest refinement. It is a mat- 
ter far below legislative attention ; while the powers of 
definition are exhausted under the stupendous accumu- 
lation of regulations and interdictions for the good 
order of society. So hardened may the moral sense 
of a community be by universal and continual custom, 
that we are perfectly aware these very remarks will 
provoke the ridicule of many persons, including, it is 
possible enough, some who may think it quite consistent 
to be ostentatiously talking at the very same time of 
Christian charity and benevolent zeal.* Nor will that 
ridicule be repressed by the notoriety of the fact, that 
the manner of the practice referred to steels and de- 
praves, to a dreadful degree, a vast number of human 
beings immediately employed about it ; and, as a spec- 
tacle, powerfully contributes to confirm, in a greater 
number, exactly that which it is, by eminence, the ob- 
ject of moral tuition to counteract — men's disposition 
to make- light of all suffering but their own. This one 
thing, this not caring for what may be endured by other 
beings made liable to suffering, is the very essence of 
the depravity which is so fatal to our race in their 
social constitution. This selfish hardness is moral plague 
* This -was actually done in a religious periodical publication. 
11 



122 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

enough even in an inactive state, as a mere carelessness 
what other beings may suffer ; but there lurks in it a 
malignity which is easily stimulated to delight in seeing 
or causing their suffering. And yet, we repeat it, a 
civilized and Christian nation feels not the slightest 
self-displacency for its allowing a certain unhappy but 
necessary part in the economy of the world to be ex- 
ecuted, (by preference to a harmless method,) in a man- 
ner which probably does as much to corroborate in the 
vulgar class this essential principle of depravity, as all 
the expedients of melioration yet applied are doing to 
expel it. 

Were it not vain and absurd to muse on supposable 
new principles in the constitution of the moral system, 
there is one that we might have been tempted to wish 
for, namely, that, of all suffering unnecessarily and wil- 
fully inflicted by man on any class of sentient existence, 
a bitter intimation and participation might be conveyed 
to him through a mysterious law of nature, enforcing 
an avenging sympathy in severe proportion to that 
suffering, on all the men who are really accountable 
for its being inflicted. 

After children and youth are trained to behold with 
something worse than hardened indifference, with a 
gratifying excitement, the sufferings of creatures dying 
for the service of man, it is no wonder if they are 
barbarous in their treatment of those that serve him 
by their life. And in fact nothing is more obvious as 
a prevailing disgrace to our nation, than the cruel 
habits of the lower class toward the laboring animals 
committed to their power. These animals have no 
security in their best condition and most efficient ser- 
vices ; but generally the hateful disposition is the most 
fully exercised on those that have been already the 
greatest sufferers. Meeting, wherever we go, with 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 123 

some of these starved, abused, exhausted figures, we 
shall not unfrequently meet with also another figure 
accompanying them — that of a ruffian, young or old, 
who with a visage of rage, and accents of hell, is 
wreaking his utmost malevolence on a wretched victim 
for being slow in performing, or quite failing to perform, 
what the excess of loading, and perhaps the feebleness 
of old age, have rendered difficult or absolutely im- 
practicable ; or for shrinking from an effort to be made 
by a pressure on bleeding sores, or for losing the right 
direction through blindness, and that itself perhaps oc- 
casioned by hardship or savage violence. Many of the 
exacters of animal labor really seem to resent it as a 
kind of presumption and insult in the slave, that it 
would be anything else than a machine, that the living- 
being should betray under its toils that it suffers, that 
it is pained, weary, or reluctant. And if, by outrageous 
abuse, it should be excited to some manifestation of 
resentment, that is a crime for which the sufferer would 
be likely to incur such a fury and repetition of blows 
and lacerations as to die on the spot, but for an inter- 
fering admonition of interest against destroying such 
a piece of property, and losing so much service. When 
that service has utterly exhausted, often before the term 
of old age, the strength of those wretched animals, 
there awaits many of them a last short stage of still 
more remorseless cruelty ; that in which it is become a 
doubtful thing whether the utmost efforts to which the 
emaciated, diseased, sinking frame can be forced by 
violence, be worth the trouble of that viol'ence, the 
delays and accidents, and the expense of the scanty 
supply of subsistence. As they must at all events very 
soon perish, it has ceased to be of any material conse- 
quence, on the score of interest, how grossly they may 
be abused ; and their tormentors seem delighted with 



124 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

this release from all restraint on their dispositions. 
Those dispositions, as indulged in some instances, when 
the miserable creatures are formally consigned to be 
destroyed, cannot be much exceeded by anything we 
can attribute to fiends. Some horrid exemplifications 
were adduced, not as single casual circumstances, but 
as usual practices, by a patriotic senator some years 
since, in endeavoring to obtain a legislative enactment 
in mitigation of the sufferings of the brute tribes. The 
design vanished to nothing in the House of Commons, 
under the effect of argument and ridicule from a person 
distinguished for intellectual cultivation; whose re- 
sistance was. not only against that specific measure, but 
avowedly against the principle itself on which any 
measure of the same tendency could ever be founded.* 
Nor could any victory have pleased him better, prob- 
ably, than one which contributed to prolong the 
barbarism of the people, as the best security, he deemed, 
for their continuing fit to labor at home and fight 
abroad. It might have added to this gratification to 
hear (as was the fact) his name pronounced with delight 
by ruffians of all classes, who regarded him as their 
patron saint. 

If any one should be inclined to interpose here with 
a remark, that after such a reference, we have little 
right to ascribe to those classes, as if it were peculiarly 
one of their characteristics, the insensibility to the 
sufferings of the brute creation, and to number it for- 
mally among the results of the "lack of knowledge," 

* Lord Erskine's memorable Bill, triumphantly scouted by 
the late Mr. Windham. — Undoubtedly there are considerable 
difficulties in the way of legislation on the subject ; but an equal 
share of difficulty attending some other subjects — an affair of 
revenue, for instance, or a measure for the suppression (at that 
time) of political opinion — would soon have been overcome. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 125 

we can only reply, that however those of higher order 
may explode any attempt to make the most efficient 
authority of the nation bear repressively upon the evil, 
and however it may in other ways be abetted by them, 
it is, at any rate, in those inferior classes chiefly that 
the actual perpetrators of it are found. It is something 
to say in favor of cultivation, that it does, generally 
speaking, render those who have the benefit of it 
incapable of practising, themselves, the most pal- 
pably flagrant of these cruelties which they may be 
virtually countenancing, by some things which they 
do, and some things which they omit or refuse to do. 
Mr. Windham would not himself have practised a 
wanton barbarity on a poor horse or ass, though he 
scouted any legislative attempt to prevent it among his 
inferiors. 

The proper place would perhaps have been nearer 
the beginning of this description of the characteristics 
of our uneducated people, for one so notorious, and one 
entering so much into the essence of the evils already 
named, as that we mention next ; a rude, contracted, 
unsteady, and often perverted sense of right and wrong 
in general. 

It is curious to look into a large volume of religious 
casuistry, the work of some divine of a former age, 
(for instance Bishop Taylor's Ductor Duhitantium,) 
with the reflection what a conscience disciplined in the 
highest degree might be ; and then to observe what 
this regulator of the soul actually is where there has 
been no sound discipline of the reason, and where there 
is no deep religious sentiment to rectify the perceptions 
in the absence of an accurate intellectual discrimination 
of things. This sentiment being wanting, dispositions 
and conduct cannot be taken account of according to 



126 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the distinction between holiness and sin; and in the 
absence of a cultivated understanding, they cannot be 
brought to the test of the distinguishing law between 
propriety and turpitude ; nor estimated upon any com- 
prehensive notion of utility. The evidence of all this 
is thick and close around us; so that every serious 
observer has been struck and almost shocked to observe, 
in what a very small degree conscience is a necessary 
attribute of the human creature; and how nearly a 
nonentity the whole system of moral principles may be, 
as to any recognition of it by an unadapted spirit. 
While that system is of a substance veritable and eter- 
nal, and stands forth in its exceeding breadth, marked 
with the strongest characters and prominences, it has 
to these persons hardly the reality or definiteness of a 
shadow, except in a few matters, if we may so express 
it, of the grossest bulk. There must be glaring evi- 
dence of something bad in what is done, or questioned 
whether to be done, before conscience will come to its 
duty, or give proof of its existence. There must be a 
violent alarm of mischief or danger before this drowsy 
and ignorant magistrate will interfere. And since oc- 
casions thus involving flagrant evil cannot be of very 
frequent occurrence in the life of the generality of the 
people, it is probable that many of them have consid- 
erably protracted exemptions from any interference of 
conscience at all ; it is certain that they experience no 
such pertinacious attendance of it, as to feel habitually 
a monitory intimation, that without great thought and 
care they will inevitably do something wrong. But 
what may we judge and presage of the moral fortunes 
of a sojourner, of naturally corrupt propensity, in this 
bad world, who is not haunted, sometimes to a degree 
of alarm, by this monitory sense, through the whole 
course of his life ? What is likely to become of him, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 127 

if he shall go hither and thither on the scene exempt 
from all sensible obstruction of the many interdictions, 
of a nature too refined for any sense but the vital ten- 
derness of conscience to perceive ? 

Obstructions of a more gross and tangible nature he 
is continually meeting. A large portion of what he is 
accustomed to see presents itself to him in the charac- 
ter of boundary and prohibition; on every hand there 
is something to warn him what he must not do. There 
are high walls, and gates, and fences, and brinks of tor- 
rents and precipices ; in short, an order of things on 
all sides signifying to him, with more or less of menace, 
— Thus far and no further. And he is in a general 
way obsequious to this arrangement. We do not ordi- 
narily expect to see him carelessly transgressing the 
most decided of the artificial boundaries, or daring 
across those dreadful ones of nature. But, nearly des- 
titute of the faculty to perceive, (as in coming in con- 
tact \Vith something charged with the element of light- 
ning,) the awful interceptive lines of that other arrange- 
ment which he is in the midst of as a subject of the 
laws of God, we see with what insensibility he can pass 
through those prohibitory significations of the Almighty 
will, which are to devout men as lines streaming with 
an infinitely more formidable than material fire. And 
if we look on to his future course, proceeding under so 
fatal a deficiency, the consequence foreseen is, that 
those lines of divine interdiction which he has not 
conscience to perceive as meant to deter him, he 
will seem as if he had acquired, through a perverted 
will, a recognition of in another quality — as temptations 
to attract him. 

But to leave these terms of generality and advert to 
a few particulars of illustration : — Recollect how com- 
monly persons of the class described are found utterly 



128 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

violating truth, not in hard emergencies only, but as an 
habitual practice, and apparently without the slightest 
reluctance or compunction, their moral sense quite at 
rest under the accumulation of a thousand deliberate 
falsehoods. It is seen that by far the greater number 
of them think it no harm to take little unjust advanta- 
ges in their dealings, by deceptive management ; and 
very many would take the greatest but for fear of tem- 
poral consequences ; would do it, that is to say, with- 
out inquietude of conscience, in the proper sense. It 
is the testimony of experience from persons who have 
had the most to transact with them, that the indispen- 
sable rule of proceeding is to assume generally their 
want of principle, and leave it to time and prolonged 
trial to establish, rather slowly, the individual excep- 
tions. Those unknowing admirers of human nature, or 
of English character, who are disposed to exclaim 
against this as an illiberal rule, may be recommended 
to act on what they will therefore deem a liberal one — 
at their cost. 

That power of established custom, which is so great, 
as we had occasion to show, on the moral sense of even 
better instructed persons, has its dominion complete 
over that of the vulgar ; insomuch that the most une- 
quivocal iniquity of a practice long suffered to exist, 
shall hardly bring to their mere recollection the com- 
mon acknowledged rule not to do as we would wish not 
done to us. From recent accounts it appears, that the 
entire coast of our island is not yet clear of those peo- 
ple called wreckers, who felt not a scruple to appropri- 
ate whatever they could seize of the lading of vessels 
cast ashore, and even whatever was worth tearino- from 
the personal possession of the unfortunate beings who 
might be escaping but just alive from the most dread- 
ful peril. The cruelty we have so largely attributed to 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 129 

our English vulgar, never recoils on them in self-re- 
proach. The habitual indulgence of the irascible, vex- 
atious, and malicious tempers, to the plague or terror 
of all within reach, scarcely ever becomes a subject of 
judicial estimate, as a character hateful in the abstract, 
■with them a reflection of that estimate on the man's 
own self. He reflects but just enough to say to him- 
self that it is all right and deserved, and unavoidable, 
too, for he is unpardonably crossed and provoked ; nor 
will he be driven from this self-approval, when it may 
be evident to every one else that the provocations are 
comparatively slight, and are only taken as offences by 
a disposition habitually seeking occasions to vent its 
spite. The inconvenience and vexation incident to low 
vice, may make the offenders fret at themselves for 
having been so foolish, but it is in general with an ex- 
tremely trifling degree of the sense of guilt. Sugges- 
tions of reprehension, in even the discreetest terms, 
and from persons confessedly the best authorized to 
make them, would not seldom be answered by a grin- 
ning, defying carelessness, in some instances by abusive 
retort ; instead of any betrayed signs of an internal ac- 
knowledgment of deserving reproof. 

And while thus the censure of a fellow-mortal 
meets no internal testimony to own its justice, this in- 
sensate self-complacency is undisturbed also on the 
side toward heaven. A mere philosopher, that should 
make little account of religion, otherwise than as capa- 
ble of being applied to enforce and aggravate the sense 
of obligation with respect to rules of conduct, and 
would not, provided it may have this effect, care much 
about its truth or falsehood, — might be disposed to 
assert that the ignorant and debased part of the popu- 
lation, of this Christian and Protestant country, are 
but so much the worse for the riddance of some parts 



130 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of the superstitions of former ages. He might allege, 
with plausibility, that the system which imposed so 
many falsehoods, vain observances, and perversions of 
moral principles, acknowledging nevertheless some cor- 
rect rules of morality, as an external practical concern, 
had the advantage of enjoining them, as far as it chose 
to do so, with the force of superstition, a stronger au- 
thority with a rude conscience than that of plain sim- 
ple religion. That system exercised a mighty complex- 
ity and accumulation of authority, all avowedly divine ; 
by which it could artificially augment, or rather super- 
sede, the mere divine prescription of such rules, making 
itself the authority and prescriber ; and thus could infix 
them in the moral sense of the people with something 
more, or something else, than the simple divine sanction. 
Whereas, now when those superstitions which held the 
people so powerfully in awe, are gone, and have taken 
away with them that spurious sanction, there remains 
nothing to exert the same power of moral enforcement ; 
since the people have not, in their exemption from the 
superstitions of their ancestors, come under any solemn 
and commanding effect of the true idea of the Divine 
Majesty. And it is undeniable that this is the state of 
conscience among them. The vague, faint notion, as 
they conceive it, of a being who is said to be the crea- 
tor, governor, lawgiver, and judge, and who dwells 
perhaps somewhere in the sky, has not, to many of 
them, the smallest force of intimidation from evil, at 
least when they are in health and daylight. One of 
the large sting-armed insects of the air does not alarm 
them less. A certain transitory fearfulness that occa- 
sionally comes upon them, points more to the Devil, and 
perhaps (in times now nearly gone by) to the ghosts of 
the dead, than to the Almighty. It may be, indeed, 
that this feeling is in its ultimate principle, if it were 



ON POPULAR GNORANCE. 131 

ever followed up so far, an acknowledgment of justice 
and power in God, reaching to wicked men through 
these mysterious agents ; who though intending no ser- 
vice to hira, but actuated by dispositions of their own, 
malignant in the greatest of them, and supposed inau- 
spicious in the others, are yet carrying into effect 
his hostility. But it is little beyond such proximate 
objects of apprehension that many minds extend their 
awe of invisible spiritual existence. Even the notion 
really entertained by them of the greatness of God, 
may be entertained in such a manner as to have but 
slight power to restrain the inclinations to sin, or to 
impress the sense of guilt after it is committed. He 
is too great, they readily say, to mind the little matters 
that such creatures as we may do amiss; they can do* 
Mm no harm. The idea, too, of his bounty, is of such 
unworthy consistency as to be a protection against all 
conscious reproach of ingratitude and neglect of service 
toward bim ; — he has made us to need all this that it is 
said he does for us ; and it costs him nothing, it is no 
labor, and he is not the less rich ; and besides, we have 
toil, and want, and plague enough, notwithstanding 
anything that he gives. 

It is probable this unhappiness of their condition, 
oftener than any other cause, brings God into their 
thoughts, and that as a being against whom they have 
a complaint approaching to a quarrel on account of it. 
And this strongly assists the reaction against whatever 
would enforce the sense of guilt on the conscience. 
When he has done so little for us, (something like this 
is the sentiment,) he cannot think it any such great 
matter if we do sometimes come a little short of his 
commands. Ttere is no doubt that their recollections 
of him as a being to murmur against for their allotment, 
are more frequent, more dwelt upon, and with more of 



132 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

an excited feeling, than their recollections of him as a 
being whom they ought to have loved and served, but 
have offended against. The very idea of such offence, 
as the chief and essential constituent of wickedness, is 
so slightly conceived, (because he is invisible, and has 
his own felicity, and is secure against all injury,) that 
if the thoughts of one of these persons should, by some 
rare occasion, be forced into the direction of unwillingly 
seeing his own faults, it is probable his impiety would 
appear the most inconsiderable thing in the account ; 
that he would easily forgive himself the negation of all 
acts and feelings of devotion towards the Supreme 
Being, and the countless multiplications of insults to 
him by profane language. 

To conclude this part of the melancholy statement ; 
it may be observed of the class in question, that they 
have but very little notion of guilt, or possible guilt, in 
anything but external practice. That busy interior 
existence, which is the moral person, genuine and com- 
plete ; the thoughts, imaginations, volitions ; the mo- 
tives, projects, deliberations, devices, the indulgence of 
the ideas of what they cannot or dare not practically 
realize, — all this, we have reason to believe, passes 
nearly exempted from jurisdiction, even of that feeble 
and undecisive kind which may occasionally attempt an 
interference with their actions. They do indeed take 
such notice of the quality of these things within, as to 
be aware that some of them are not to be disclosed in 
their communications ; which prudential caution has of 
course little to do with conscience, when the things so 
withheld are internally cherished in perfect disregard 
of the Omniscient Observer, and with hardly the faint- 
est monition that the essence of the guilt is the same, 
with only a difference in degree, in intending or delib- 
erately desiring an evil, and in acting it. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 133 

It is not natural obtuseness of mental faculty that 
we are attributing, all this while, to the uneducated 
class of our people, in thus exposing the defectiveness 
of their discernment between right and wrong. If it 
were, there might arise somewhat of the consolation 
afforded in contemplating some of the very lowest of 
the savage tribes of mankind, by the idea that such 
outcasts of the rational nature must stand very nearly 
exempt from accountableness, through absolute natural 
want of mind. But in the barbarians of our country 
we shall often observe a very competent, and now and 
then an abundant, share of native sense. We may see 
it evinced in respect to the very questions of morality, 
in cases where they are quite compelled, as will occa- 
sionally happen, to feel themselves brought within the 
cognizance of one or other of its plainest rules. In 
such cases we have witnessed a sharpness and activity 
of intellect claiming almost our admiration. What 
contrivance of deception and artful evasion. What 
dexterity of quibble, and captious objection, and petty 
sophistry. What vigilance to observe how the plea 
in justification or excuse takes effect, and, if they per- 
ceive it does not succeed, what address in sliding into 
a different one. What quickness to avail themselves 
of any mistake, or apparent concession, in the exam- 
iner or reprover. What copious rhetoric in exaggera- 
tion of the cause which tempted to do wrong, or of the 
great good hoped to be effected by the little deviation 
from the right, — a good surely enough to excuse so 
trifling an impropriety. What facility of placing be- 
tween themselves and the censure, the recollected 
example of some good man who has been " overtaken 
in a fault." 

Here is mind, after all, we have been prompted to 
exclaim; mind educating itself to evil, in default of that 
12 



134 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

discipline which should have educated it to good. How 
much of the wisdom of evil, (if we may be allowed the 
expression,) there is faculty enough in the neglected 
corrupt popular mass of this nation to attain, by the 
exercise into which the individual's mind is carried by 
its own impulse, and in which he may everywhere and 
every hour find ample co-operation. Each of these 
self-improvers in depraved sense has the advantage of 
finding himself among a great tribe of similar improv- 
ers, forming an immense school, as if for the promotion 
of this very purpose ; where they all teach by a com- 
petition in learning ; where the rude faculty which is 
not expanded into intelligence is, however, sharpened 
into cunning ; where the spirit which cannot grow into 
an eagle, may take the form and action of a snake. 
This advantage, — that there should not be a diminu- 
tion of the superabundant plenty of associates always 
at hand, to assist each man in making the most of his 
native intellect for its least worthy use, — has been 
from age to age secured to our populace, as if it had 
been the most valuable birthright of Englishmen. 
Whatever else the person born to the inheritance of 
low life was destined to find in it, the national state 
had made as sure to him as it had before made the 
same privilege to his ancestors, that the generality of 
his equals should be found fit and ready to work with 
him in the acquirement of a depraved shrewdness. 

But while the bulk of the people have been, in every 
period, abandoned to such a process of educating them- 
selves and one another, where has been that character 
of parental guardianship, which seems to be ascribed 
when poets, orators, and patriots, are inspired with 
tropes, and talk of England and her children ? This 
imperial matron of their rhetoric seems to have little 
cared how much she might be disgraced in the larger 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 135 

portion of her progeny, or how little cause they might 
have to all eternity to remember her with gratitude. 
She has had far other concern about them, and employ- 
ment for them, than that of their being taught the value 
of their spiritual nature, and carefully trained to be en- 
lightened, good, and happy. Laws against crime, it is 
true, she has enacted for them in liberal quantity ; ap- 
pointed her quorums of magistrates; and not been 
sparing of punishments. She has also maintained pub- 
lic sabbath observances to remind them of religion, of 
which observances she cared not that they little un- 
derstood the very terms ; except when the reading of a 
Book of Sports was appointed an indispensable part at 
one time long after her adoption of the Reformation. 
But she might plainly see what such provisions did not 
accomplish. It was a glaring fact before her eyes, that 
the majority of her children had far more of the mental 
character of a colony from some barbarian nation, than 
of that which an enlightened and Christian state might 
have been expected to impart. She had most ample 
resources indeed for supplying the remedy ; but, pro- 
vided that the productions of the soil and the workshop 
were duly forthcoming, she thought it of no conse- 
quence, it should seem, that the operative hands be- 
longed to degraded minds. And then, too, as at all 
times, her lofty ambition destined a good proportion of 
them to the consumption of martial service, she perhaps 
judged that the less they were trained to think, the 
more fit they might be to be actuated mechanically, as 
an instrument of blind impetuous force. Or perhaps 
she thought it would be rather an inconsistency, to be 
making much of the inner existence of a thing which 
was to be, in frequent wholesale lots, sent off to be cut 
or dashed to pieces.* And besides, a certain measure 
* "Killed off," was the sentimental phrase emitted in parlia 



136 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of instruction to think, especially if consisting, in a con- 
siderable part, of the inculcation of religion, might have 
done something to disturb that notion, (so worthy to 
have been transferred from the Mohammedan creed,) 
which she was by no means desirous to expel from her 
fleets and armies, that death for "king and country" 
clears off all accounts for sin. 

Let our attention be directed a little while to the 
effects of the privation of knowledge, as they may be 
seen conspicuous in the several parts of the economy 
of life, in the uneducated part of the community. Ob- 
serve those people in their daily occupations. None of 
us need be told that, of the prodigious diversity of 
manual employments, some consist of, or include, 
operations of such minuteness or complexity, and so 
much demanding nicety, arrangement, or combination, 
as to necessitate the constant and almost entire atten- 
tion of the mind ; nor that all of them must require its 
full attention at times, at particular stages, changes, 
and adjustments, of the work. We allow this its full 
weight, to forbid any extravagant notion of how much 
it is possible to think of other things during the work- 
ing time. It is however to be recollected, that persons 
of a class superior to the numerous one we have in view, 
take the chief share of those portions of the arts and 
manufactures which require the most of mental effort, 
— those which demand extreme precision, or inventive 
contrivance, or taste, or scientific skill. We may also 
take into the account of the allotment of employments 
to the uncultivated multitude, how much facility is 
acquired by habit, how much use there is of instru- 
mental mechanism, (a grand exempter from the respon- 

ment, in easy unconsciousness of offence, by the accomplished 
senator named in a former page. He probably was really un 
aware that the creatures were made for anything better. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 137 

sibility that would lie on the mind,) and how merely- 
general and very slight an attention is exacted in the 
ordinary course of some of the occupations. These 
things considered, we may venture perhaps to assume, 
on an average of those employments, that the persons 
engaged in them might be, as much at least as one 
third part of the time, without detriment to the manual 
performance, giving the thoughts to other things with 
attention enough for such interest as would involve 
improvement. This is particularly true of the more 
ordinary parts of the labors of agriculture, when not 
under any critical circumstances, or special pressure 
owing to the season. 

But as the case at present is, what does become, 
during such portion of the time, of the ethereal essence 
which inhabits the corporeal laborer, this spirit creat- 
ed, it is commonly said and without contradiction, for 
thought, knowledge, religion, and immortality ? If we 
be really to believe this doctrine of its nature and des- 
tiny, (for we are not sure that politicians think so,) 
can we know without regret, that in very many of the 
persons in the situations supposed, it suffers a dull ab- 
sorption, subsides into the mere physical nature, is sunk 
and sleeping in the animal warmth and functions, and 
lulled and rocked, as it were, in its lethargy, by the 
bodily movements, in the works which it is not neces- 
sary for it to keep habitually awake to direct ? And 
its obligation to keep just enough awake to see to the. 
right performance of the work, seems to give a licensed 
exemption from any other stirring of its faculties. The 
emplo} 7 ment is something to he minded, in a general 
way, though but now and then requiring a pointed at- 
tention; and therefore this said intellectual being, if 
uninformed and unexercised, will feel no call to mind 
anything else: as a person retained for some service 
12* 



138 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

which demands but occasionally an active exercise, will 
justify the indolence which declines taking in hand any 
other business in the intervals, under the pretext that 
he has his appointment ; and so, when not under the 
immediate calls of that appointment, he will trifle or 
go to sleep, even in the full light of day, with an easy 
conscience. 

But here we are to beware of falling into the inad- 
vertency of appearing to say, that the laboring classes, 
in this country and age, have actually this full exemp- 
tion, during their employments, from all exercise of 
thought beyond that which is immediately requisite 
for the right performance of their work. It is true 
that there is little enough of any such mental activity 
directed to the instructive uses we were supposing. 
But while such partial occupation of the thoughts (of 
course it is admitted, in an irregular and discontinuous, 
but still a beneficial manner) with topics and facts 
of what may be called intellectual and moral interest 
as we are assuming to be compatible with divers of the 
manual operations, is a thing to which most among the 
laboring classes are strangers, many of them are equally 
strangers to an easy vacancy of mind; experiencing 
amidst their employments a severe arrest of those 
thoughts which the mere employment itself may leave 
free. During the little more than mechanical action 
of their hands and eyes, the circumstances of their con- 
dition press hard into their minds. The lot of many 
of those classes is placed in a melancholy disproportion 
between what must be given to the cares and toils for 
a bare subsistence, and what can, at most, be given to 
the interests of the nobler part of their nature, either 
during their work or in its intervals. It is a sad spec- 
tacle to behold so many myriads of spiritual beings, 
(proviso, again, that we may call them so without being 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 139 

suspected to forget that their proper calling is to work 
with their hands,) doomed to consume a proportion, 
so little short of the whole of their vigor and time, in 
just merely supporting so many bodies in the struggle 
to live. 

When it is in special relation to the present times 
that we speak of this struggle to live, we of course 
mean by it something more than that circumstance 
of the general lot of humanity which is expressed in 
the sentence, " In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat 
thy bread." We put the emphasis on the peculiar ag- 
gravation of that circumstance in this part of the world 
in this and recent times, by the adventitious effect of 
some dreadful disorder of the social economy, in conse- 
quence of which the utmost exertions of the body and 
mind together but barely suffice in so many cases, in 
some hardly do suffice, for the mere protraction of life ; 
comfortable life being altogether out of the question. 
The course of the administration of the civilized states, 
and the recent dire combustion into which they have 
almost unanimously rushed, as in emulation which of 
them should with the least reserve, and with the most 
desperate rapidity, annihilate the resources that should 
have been for the subsistence and competence of their 
people, have resulted in such destitution and misery in 
this country as were never known before, except as 
immediately inflicted by the local visitation of some 
awful calamity. The state of very many of our people, 
at this hour, is nearly what might be conceived as the 
consequence of a failure of the accustomed produce of 
the earth. * 

* No exaggeration at the time when it was written. The con- 
dition of the working classes during the subsequent years does 
not admit of any comprehensive uniform description. It has 
suffered successive harassing fluctuations, and been probably at 



140 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

There is no wish to deny or underrate the additions 
made to the evil by the intervention of causes, whose 
operation admits of being traced in some measure dis- 
tinctly from the effect of this grand one. They may 
be traced in an operation which is distinguishable ; and 
referable to each respectively ; but it were most absurd 
to represent them as working out of connection, or 
otherwise than subordinately concurring, with that 
cause which has invaded with its pernicious effects 
everything that has an existence or a name in the social 
system. And it were simply monstrous to attribute 
the main substance of so wide and oppressive an evil 
to causes of any debateable quality, while there is 
glaring in sight a cause of stupendous magnitude, which 
could not possibly do otherwise than produce immense 
and calamitous effects. It would be as if a man were 
prying about for this and the. other cause of damage, to 
account for the aspect of a region which has recently 
been devastated by inundations or earthquakes. It 
has become much a fashion to explain the distresses of 
a country on any principles rather than those that are 
taught by all history, and prominently manifest in the 
nature of things. And airs of superior intelligence 
shall be assumed on hearing a plain man fix the main 
charge of national exhaustion and distress on the na- 
tion's consuming its own strength in an unquenchable 
fury to destroy that of others ; just as if such madness 
had never been known to result in poverty and dis- 
tress, and it were perfectly inexplicable how it should. 
This is partly an affectation of science, accompanied, it 
is likely, by somewhat of that sincere extravagance 
with which some newly developed principle is apt to 
be accounted the comprehension of all wisdom, & nos- 

all times severely distressing in one part of the country o an- 
other. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 141 

trum that will explain everything. But we suspect 
that in many instances this substitution of subordinate 
causes for a great substantial one, proceeds from some- 
thing much worse than such affectation or self-duped 
extravagance. It is from a resolute determination that 
ambition shall be the noblest virtue of a state ; that 
martial glory shall maintain its ground in human idol- 
atry ; and that wars and their promoters shall be justi- 
fied at all hazards. 

We were wishing to show how the laboring people's 
thoughts might be partly employed, during their daily 
task, and consistently with industry and good workman- 
ship. But what a state of things is exhibited where 
the very name of industry, the virtue universally hon- 
ored, the topic of so many human and divine inculca^ 
tions, cannot be spoken without offering a bitter in- 
sult ; where the heavy toil, denounced on man for his 
transgression, in the same sentence as death, is in vain 
implored as the greatest privilege ; or thought of in 
despair, as a blessing too great to be attainable ; and 
when the reply of the artisan to an unwitting admoni- 
tion, that even amidst his work he might have some 
freedom for useful thinking, may be, " Thinking ! I 
have no work to confine my thinking ; I may, for that, 
employ it all on other subjects ; but those subjects are, 
whether I please or not, the plenty and luxury in which 
many creatures of the same kind as myself are rioting, 
and the starvation which I and my family are suffering." 

We hope in Providence, more than in any wisdom 
or disposition shown by men, that this melancholy state 
of things will be alleviated, otherwise than by a reduc- 
tion of number through the diseases generated by utter 
penury.' 7 ' We trust the time will come when the 

* It has been alleviated ; but not till after a considerable du- 
ration. In England it has ; but look at Ireland ? 



142 ON POPULAR, IGNORANCE. 

Christian monitor shall no longer be silenced by the 
apprehension of such a reply to the suggestion he wishes 
to make to the humble class, that they should strive 
against being reduced to mere machines amidst their 
manual employments ; that it is miserable to have the 
whole mental existence shrunk and shrivelled as it 
were to the breadth of the material they are working 
upon ; that the noble interior agent, which lends itself 
to maintain the external activity, and direct the ope- 
rations required of the bodily powers for the body's 
welfare, has eminently a right and claim to have 
employments on its own account, during such parts of 
those operations as do not of necessity monopolize its 
attention. It may claim, in the superintendence of 
these, a privilege analogous to that possessed in the 
general direction of subordinate agents by a man of 
science, who will interfere as often as it is necessary, 
but will not give up all other thought and employment 
to be a constant mere looker-on, during such parts of 
the operations as are of so ordinary a nature that he 
could not really fix his attention on them. 

But how is the mind of the laborer or artisan to be 
delivered from the blank and stupified state, during the 
parts of his employment that do not necessarily engross 
his thoughts ? How, but by its having within some 
store of subjects for thought; something for memory, 
imagination, reflection ; in a word, by the possession of 
knowledge ? How can it be sensibly alive and active, 
when it is placed fully and decidedly out of communi- 
cation with all things that are friendly to intellectual 
life, all things that apply a beneficial stimulus to the 
faculties, all things, of this world or another, that are 
the most inviting or commanding to thought and 
emotion? We can imagine this ill-fated spirit, espe- 
cially if by nature of the somewhat finer temperament, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 143 

thus detached from all vital connection, secluded from 
the whole universe, and inclosed as by a prison wall, — 
we can imagine it sometimes moved with an indistinct 
longing for its appropriate interests ; and going round 
and round by this dark, dead wall, to seek for any spot 
where there might be a chance of escape, or any crevice 
where a living element for the soul transpires ; and 
then, as feeling it all in vain, dejectedly resigning itself 
again to its doom. Some ignorant minds have instinc- 
tive impulses of this kind ; though far more of them are 
so deeply stupified as to be habitually safe from any 
such inquietude. But let them have received, in their 
youth and progressively afterwards, a considerable 
measure of interesting information, respecting, for in- 
stance, the many striking objects on the globe they 
inhabit, the memorable events of past ages, the origin 
and uses of remarkable works within their view, re- 
maining froni ancient times ; the causes of effects and 
phenomena familiar to their observation as now unin- 
telligible facts ; the prospects of man, from the relation 
he stands in to time, and eternity, and God, explained 
by the great principles and facts of religion. Let 
there be fixed in their knowledge so many ideas of 
these kinds, as might be imparted by a comparatively 
humble education, (one quite compatible with the des- 
tination to a life of ordinary employment,) and even 
involuntarily the thoughts would often recur to these 
subjects, in those moments and hours when the manual 
occupation can, and actually will, be prosecuted with 
but little of exclusive attention. Slight incidents, 
casual expressions, would sometimes suggest these 
subjects; by association they would suggest one an- 
other. The mere reaction of a somewhat cultivated 
spirit against invading dulness, might recall some of 
the more amusing and elating ones ; and they would 



144 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

fall like a gleam of sunshine on the imagination. An 
emotion of conscience, a self-reflection, an occurring 
question of duty, a monitory sensation of defective 
health, would sometimes point to the serious and solemn 
ones. The mind might thus go a considerable way, to 
recreate or profit itself, and, on coming back again, 
find all safe in the processes of the field or the loom. 
The man would thus come from these processes with 
more than the bare earnings to set against the fatigue. 
There would thus be scattered some appearances to 
entertain, and some sources and productions to refresh, 
over what were else a dead and barren flat of 
existence. 

There is no romancing in all this ; we have known 
instances of its verification to a very pleasing and 
exemplary extent. We have heard persons of the 
class in question tell of the exhilarating imaginations, 
or solemn reflections, which, through the reminiscences 
of what they had read in youth or more advanced years, 
had visited their minds ; and put them, as it were, in 
communication for a while with diversified, remote, 
and elevated objects, while in their humble employ- 
ments under the open sky or the domestic roof. And 
is not this, (if it be true, after all, that the intellectual, 
immortal nature is by emphasis the man,) is not this 
vastly better than that this mind should lie nearly as 
dormant, during the laborer's hours of business, as 
his attendant of the canine species shall be sometimes 
seen to do in the corner of the field where he is at 
work ? 

But perhaps it will be said, that the minds of the 
uncultivated order are not generally in this state of 
utter inanity during their common employments ; but 
are often awake and busy enough in recollections, 
fancies, projects, and the tempers appropriate; and 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 145 

that they abundantly show this when they stop some- 
times in their work to talk, or talk as they are pro- 
ceeding- in it. So much the stronger, we answer, the 
argument for supplying them with useful knowledge ; 
for it were better their mental being were sunk in 
lethargy, than busy among the reported, recollected, or 
imagined transactions, the wishes, and the schemings, 
which will be the most likely to occupy the minds of 
persons abandoned to ignorance, vulgarity, and there- 
fore probably to low vice. 

We may add to the representation, the manner in 
which they spend the part of their time not demanded 
for the regular, or the occasional, exercise of their 
industry. It is not to be denied that many of them 
have too much truth in their pleading that, with the 
exception of Sunday, they have little remission of their 
toils till 'they are so weary that the remainder of the 
time is needed for complete repose. This is partic- 
ularly the case of the females, especially those who 
have the chief cares and the actual work of a family. 
Nevertheless, it is within our constant observation that 
a considerable proportion of the men, a large one of the 
younger men, in the less heavily oppressed divisions of 
our population, do in fact include, for substance, their 
manual employments within such limits of time, as 
often to leave several hours in the day to be spent 
nearly as they please. And in what manner, for the 
most part, is this precious time expended by those of 
no mental cultivation ? It is true, again", that in many 
departments of labor, a diligent exertion during even 
this limited space of the day, occasions such a degree 
of lassitude and heaviness as to render it almost in- 
evitable, especially in certain seasons of the year, to 
surrender some moments of the spare time, beyond 
what is necessary for the humble repast, to a kind of 
13 



146 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

listless subsidence of all the powers of both body and 
mind. But after all these allowances fully conceded, a 
great number in the class under consideration have in 
some days several hours, and in the whole six days of 
the week, on an average of the year, very many hours, 
to be given, as they choose, to useful purposes or to 
waste ; and again we ask, where the mind itself has 
been left waste how is that time mostly expended ? 

If the persons are of a phlegmatic temperament, we 
shall often see them just simply annihilating those por- 
tions of time. They will for an hour, or for hours to- 
gether, if not disturbed by some cause from without, 
sit on a bench, or lie down on a bank or hillock, or lean 
on a wall, or fill the lire-side chair ; yielded up to utter 
vacancy and torpor, not asleep perhaps, but more lost 
to mental existence than if they were; since the 
dreams, that would probably visit their slumbers, would 
be a more lively train of ideas than any they have 
awake. Of a piece with this is the habit, among many 
of this order of people, of giving formally to sleep as 
much as one-third part, sometimes considerably more^ 
of the twenty-four hours. Certainly there are innu- 
merable cases in which infirmity, care, fatigue, and the 
comfortlessness and penury of the humble dwelling, 
effectually plead for a large allowance of this balm of 
oblivion. But very many surrender themselves to this 
excess from destitution of anything to keep their minds 
awake, especially in the evenings of the winter. What 
a contrast is here suggested to the imagination of those 
who have read Dr. Henderson's, and other recent de- 
scriptions, of the habits of the people of Iceland ! 

These, however, are their most harmless modes of 
wasting the time. For, while we might think of the 
many hours merged by them in apathy and needless 
sleep, with a wish that those hours could be recovered 



ON POIULAR IGNORANCE. 147 

to the account of their existence, we might well wish 
that the hours could be struck out of it which they 
ma)' sometimes give, instead, to conversation ; in parties 
where ignorance, coarse vulgarity, and profaneness, are 
to support the dialogue, on topics the most to their 
taste ; always including, as the most welcome to that 
taste, the depravities and scandals of the neighbor- 
hood ; while all the reproach and ridicule, expended 
with good-will on those depravities, have the strange 
result of making the censors the less disinclined them- 
selves to practise them, and only a little better instruct- 
ed how to do it with impunity. In many instances 
there is the additional mischief, that these assemblings 
for corrupt communication find their resort at the pub- 
lic-house, where intemperance and ribaldry may season 
each other, if the pecuniary means for the former in- 
gredient can be afforded, even at the cost of distress at 
home. — But without including depravity of this degree, 
the worthlessness of the communications of a number 
of grossly ignorant associates is easy to be imagined • 
besides that most of us have been made judges of their 
quality by numberless occasions of unavoidably hearing 
samples of them. 

-In the finer seasons of the year, much of these leis- 
ure spaces of time can be expended out of doors ; and 
we have still only to refer to every one's own observa- 
tion of the account to which they are turned, in the 
lives of beings whose lot allows but so contracted a 
portion of time to be, at the best, applied directly to 
the highest purposes of life. — Here the hater of all 
such schemes of improvement, as would threaten to 
turn the lower order into what that hater may proba- 
bly call Methodists, (a term we venture to interpret for 
him as meaning thoughtful beings and Christians,) 
comes in with a ready cant of humanity and commiser- 



148 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ation. And why, he says, with an affected indignation 
of philanthropy, why should not the poor creatures 
enjoy a little fresh air and cheerful sunshine; and have 
a chance of keeping their health, confined as many of 
them are, for the greatest part of the time, in narrow, 
squalid rooms, unwholesome workshops, and every sort 
of disagreeable places and employments ? Very true, 
we answer ; and why should not numbers of them be 
collected in groups by the road-side, in readiness to find 
in whatever passes there occasions for gross jocularity; 
practising some impertinence, or uttering some jeering 
scurrility, at the expense of persons going by ; shout- 
ing with laughter at the success of the annoyance, or 
to make it successful ; and all this blended with lan- 
guage of profaneness and imprecation, as the very life 
of the hilarity ? Or why should not the boldest spirits 
among them form a little conventicle for cursing, blas- 
pheming, and blackguard obstreperousness in the street, 
about the entrance of one of the haunts of intoxication ; 
where they are perfectly safe from that worse mischief 
of a gloomy fanaticism, with which they might have 
been smitten if seduced to frequent the meeting-house 
twenty paces off? Or why should not the children, 
growing into the stage called youth, be turned loose 
through the lanes, roads, and fields, to form a brawl- 
ing, impudent rabble, trained by their association to 
every low vice, and ambitiously emulating, in voice, 
visage, and manners, the ruffians and drabs of maturer 
growth? Or why should not the young men and 
women collect in clusters, or range about or beyond the 
neighborhood in bands, for revel, frolic, and all kinds of 
coarse mirth ; to come back late at night to quarrel 
with their wretched elders, who perhaps envy them 
their capacity for such wild gaieties and strollings, while 
rating them for their disorderly habits? We say 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 149 

where can he the harm of all this ? What reasonable 
and benevolent man would think of making any objec- 
tion to it? Reasonable and benevolent, — for these 
have been among the qualities boasted for the occasion 
by the opposers of any materially improved education 
of the people ; while in such opposition they virtually 
avowed their willing tolerance of all that is here de- 
scribed. 

We have allowed most fully the plea of how little 
time, comparatively, could be afforded to the concern 
of mental improvement by the lower classes from their 
indispensable employments ; and also that of the con- 
sequent fatigue, causing a temporary incapacity of ef- 
fort in any other way. But this latter plea cannot be 
admitted without great abatement in the case of our 
neglected young people of the working classes ; for 
when we advert to their actual habits, we see that, nev- 
ertheless, time, strength, and wakefulness, and spring 
and spirit for exertion, are found for a vast deal of 
busy diversion, much of it blended with such folly as 
tends to vice. 

If such is the manner in which the spare time of the 
week-days goes to waste and worse, the Sunday is wel- 
comed as giving scope for the same things on a larger 
scale. It is very striking to consider, that several mil- 
lions, we may safely assert, of our English people, ar- 
rived at what should be years of discretion, are almost 
completely destitute of any manner of conscience re- 
specting this seventh part of time ; not merely as to 
any required consecration of it to religion, but as to its 
being under any claim or of any worth at all, otherwise 
than for amusement. It is actually regarded by them 
as a section of time far less under obligation than any 
other. They take it as so absolutely at their free dis- 
posal, by a right so exclusively vested in their taste and 
13* 



150 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

will, that a demand made even in behalf of their own 
most important interests, is contemptuously repelled as 
a sanctimonious impertinence. If the idea occurs at all 
(with multitudes it never does) of claims which they 
have heard that God should make on the hours, it is 
dismissed with the thought that it really cannot signify 
to him how creatures, condemned by his appointment 
to toil all the rest of the week, may wish to spend this 
one day, on which the secular taskmaster manumits 
them, and He, the spiritual one, might surely do as 
much. An immense number pay no attention whatever 
to any sort of religious worship ; and many of those 
that do give an hour or two to such an observance, do 
so, some of them as merely a diversification of amuse- 
ment, and the others by way of taking a license of ex- 
emption from any further accountableness for the man- 
ner in which they may spend the day. It is the natural 
consequence of all this, that there is more folly, if not 
more crime, committed on this than on all the other six 
days together. 

Thus man, at least ignorant man, is unfit to be trusted 
with anything under heaven ; since a remarkable ap- 
pointment for raising the general tenor of moral exist- 
ence, has with these persons the effect of sinking it. 
There is interposed, at frequent regular intervals 
throughout the series of their days, a richer vein, as it 
were, of time. The improvement of this, in a manner 
by no means strained to the austerity of exercise pre- 
scribed in the Puritan rules, might diffuse a worth and 
a grace over all the time between, and assist them 
against the tendency there may be in its necessary 
habits and employments, to depress the intelligent na- 
ture into meanness or debasement. The space which 
they are passing over is marked, at near intervals, with 
broad lines of a benignant light, which might spread 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 151 

an appearance of mild lustre over the whole extent as 
contemplated in retrospect ; but how many, in looking 
back when near the end of their progress, have to per- 
ceive its general shade rendered darker by the very 
spaces where that light had been shed from heaven. 

The Sundays of those who do not improve them to 
a good purpose, will infallibly be perverted to a bad 
one. But it were still a melancholy account if we could 
regard them as merely standing for nothing, as a blank 
in the life of this class of the people. It is a deeply 
unhappy spectacle and reflection, to see a man of per- 
haps more than seventy, sunk in the grossness and 
apathy of an almost total ignorance of all the most 
momentous subjects, and then to consider, that, since 
he came to an age of some natural capacity for the ex- 
ercise of his mind, there have been more than three 
thousand Sundays. In their long succession they were 
his time. That is to say, he had the property in them 
which every man has in duration ; they were present 
to him, he had them, he spent them. Perhaps some 
compassionate friend may have been pleading in his be- 
half, — Alas ! what opportunity, what time, has the poor 
mortal ever had? His lot has been to labor hard 
through the week throughout almost his whole life. 
Yes, we answer, but he has had three thousand Sun- 
days ; what would not even the most moderate im- 
provement of so vast a sum of hours have done for him ? 
But the ill-fated man, (perhaps rejoins the commiserat- 
ing pleader,) grew up from his childhood in utter ig- 
norance of any use he ought to make of time which his 
necessary employment would allow him to waste. 
There, we reply, you strike the mark. Sundays are of 
no value, nor Bibles, nor the enlarged knowledge of 
the age, nor heaven nor earth, to beings brought up in 
estrangement from all right discipline. And therefore 



152 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

we are pleading for the schemes and institutions which 
will not let human beings be thus brought up. 

In so pleading, we happily can appeal to one fact in 
evidence that the intellectual and religious culture, in 
the introductory stages of life, tends to secure that the 
persons so trained shall be, when they are come to 
maturity, marked . off from the neglected barbarous 
mass, by at least an external respect, but accompanied, 
we trust, in many of them, by a still better sentiment, 
to the means for keeping truth and duty constantly in 
their view. Observe the numbers now attending, with 
\ becoming deportment, public worship and instruction, 
as compared with what the proportion is remembered 
or recorded to have been half a century since, or any 
time previous to the great exertions of benevolence to 
save the children of the inferior classes from preserving 
the whole mental likeness of their forefathers. 

It can be testified also, by persons whose observation 
has been the longest in the habit of following children 
and youth from the instruction of the school institutions 
into mature life, that, in a gratifying number of instan- 
ces, they have been seen permanently retaining too 
much love of improvement, and too much of the habit 
of a useful employment of their minds, to sink, in 
their ordinary daily occupations, into that wretched in- 
anity we were representing ; or to consume the free in- 
tervals of time in the listlessness, or worthless gabble, 
or vain sports, of which their neighbors furnished plenty 
of example and temptation. 

These representations have partly included, what we 
may yet specify distinctly as one of the unhappy effects 
of gross ignorance — a degraded state of domestic society. 

Whatever is of nature to render individuals uninter- 
esting or offensive to one another, has a specially bad 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 153 

effect among them as members of a family ; because 
there is in that form of community itself a peculiar 
tendency to fall below the level of dignified and com- 
placent social life. — A number of persons cannot be 
placed in a state of social communication, without hav- 
ing a certain sense of claiming from one another a con- 
duct meant and adapted to please. It is expected that 
a succession of efforts should be made for this purpose, 
with a willingness of each individual to forego, in little 
things, his own inclination or convenience. This is all 
very well when the society is voluntary, and the parties 
can separate when the cost is felt to be greater than the 
pleasure. Under this advantage of being able soon to 
separate, even a company of strangers casually assem- 
bled will often recognize the claim and conform to the 
law ; with a certain indistinct sentiment partaking of 
reciprocal gratitude for the disposition which is so ac- 
commodating. But the members of the domestic com- 
munity also have each this same feeling which demands 
a mutual effort and self-denial to please, while the con- 
dition of their association is adverse to their yielding 
what they thus respectively claim. "Theirs, when once 
it is formed, is not exactly a voluntary companionship, 
and it is one of undefinable continuance. The claim 
therefore seems as if it were to be of a prolongation in- 
terminable, while the grateful feeling for the concession 
is the less for the more compulsory bond of the associ- 
ation. And to be thus required, in a community which 
must not be dissolved, and in a series that reaches away 
beyond calculation, to exercise a self-restraint on their 
wills and humors in order to please one another, goes 
so hard against the great principle of human feeling — 
namely, each one's preference of pleasing himself — that 
there is an habitual impulse of reaction against the 
claim. This shows itself in their deportment, which 



154 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

has the appearance of a practical expression of so many 
individuals that they will maintain each his own free- 
dom. Hence the absence, very commonly, in domestic 
society, of the attentiveness, the tone of civility, the 
promptitude of compliance, the habit of little accom- 
modations, voluntary and supernumerary, which are so 
observable in the intercourse of friends, acquaintance, 
and often, as we have said, even of strangers. 

And then consider, in so close a kind of community, 
what near and intimate witnesses they are of all one 
another's faults, weaknesses, tempers, perversities ; of 
whatever is offensive in manner, or unseemly in habit; 
of all the irksome, humiliating, or sometimes ludicrous 
circumstances and situations. And also, in this close 
association, the bad moods, the strifes, and resentments, 
are pressed into immediate, lasting, corrosive contact 
with whatever should be the most vital to social happi- 
ness. If there be, into the account, the wants, anxie- 
ties, and vexations of severe poverty, they will generally 
aggravate all that is destructive to domestic compla- 
cency and decorum. 

Now add gross ignorance to all this, and see what 
the picture will be. How many families have been 
seen where the parents were only the older and stronger 
animals than their children, whom they could teach 
nothing but the methods and tasks of labor. They 
naturally could not be the mere companions, for alter- 
nate play and quarrel, of their children, and were dis- 
qualified by mental rudeness to be their respected 
guardians. There were about them these young and 
rising forms, containing the inextinguishable principle, 
which was capable of entering on an endless progression 
of wisdom, goodness, and happiness ! needing number- 
less suggestions, explanations, admonitions, brief rea- 
sonings, and a training to attend to the lessons of 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 155 

written instruction. But nothing of all this from the 
parent. Their case was as hopeless for receiving these 
necessaries of mental life, as the condition, for physical 
nutriment, of infants attempting to draw it, (we have 
heard of so affecting and mournful a fact,) from the 
breast of a dead parent. These unhappy heads of 
families possessed no resources for engaging youthful 
attention by mingled instruction and amusements ; no 
descriptions of the most wonderful objects, or narratives 
of the most memorable events, to set, for superior at- 
traction, against the idle stories of the neighborhood ; 
no assemblage of admirable examples, from the sacred 
or other records of human character, to give a beauti- 
ful real form to virtue and religion, and promote an 
aversion to base companionship. 

Requirement and prohibition must be a part of the 
domestic economy habitually in operation of course ; 
and in such families you will have seen the government 
exercised, or attempted to be exercised, in the rough- 
est, barest shape of will and menace, with no aptitude 
or means of imparting to injunction and censure, a con- 
vincing and persuasive quality. Not that the seniors 
should allow their government to be placed on such a 
ground that, in everything they enforce or forbid, they 
may be liable to have their reasons demanded by the 
children, as an understood condition of their compli- 
ance. Far from it ; they will sometimes have to re- 
quire a prescribed conduct for reasons not intelligible, 
or which it may not be discreet to explain, to those 
who are to obey. But their authority becomes odious, 
and as a moral force worse than inefficient, when the 
natural shrewdness of the children can descry that they 
really have no reasons better than an obstinate or ca- 
pricious will ; and infallibly makes the inference, that 
there is no obligation to submit, but that necessity 



156 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

which dependence imposes. But this must often be 
the unfortunate condition of such families. 

Now imagine a week, month, or year, of the inter- 
course in such a domestic society, the course of talk, 
the mutual manners, and the progress of mind and 
character; where there is a sense of drudgery ap- 
proaching to that of slavery, in the unremitting neces- 
sity of labor ; where there is none of the interest of 
imparting knowledge or receiving it, or of reciprocating 
knowledge that has been imparted and received ; where 
there is not an acre, if we might express it so, of in- 
tellectual space around them, clear of the thick, univer- 
sal fog of ignorance ; where, especially, the luminaries 
of the spiritual heaven, the attributes of the Almighty, 
the grand phenomenon of redeeming mediation, the 
solemn realities of a future state and another world, 
are totally obscured in that shade ; where the con- 
science and the discriminations of duty are dull and 
indistinct, from the youngest to the oldest ; where 
there is no genuine respect on the one side, nor affec- 
tion unmixed with vulgar petulance and harshness, 
expressed perhaps in language of imprecation, on the 
other; where a mutual coarseness of manners and 
words has the effect, without their being aware of it as 
a cause, of debasing their worth in one another's es- 
teem, all round ; and where, notwithstanding all, they 
absolutely must pass a great deal of time together, to 
converse, to display their dispositions toward one an- 
other, and exemplify the poverty of the mere primary 
relations of life, as divested of the accessories which 
give them dignity, endearment, and conduciveness to 
the highest advantage of existence. 

Home has but little to please the young members of 
such a family, and a great deal to make them eager to 
escape out of the house ; which is also a welcome rid- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 157 

dance to the elder persons, when it is not in neglect or 
refusal to perform allotted tasks. So little is the feel- 
ing of a peaceful cordiality created among them by 
their seeing one another all within the habitation, that, 
not unfrequently, the passer-by may learn the fact of 
their collective number being there, from the sound of 
a low strife of mingled voices, some of them betraying 
youth replying in anger or contempt to maturity or age. 
It is wretched to see how early this liberty is boldly 
taken. As the children perceive nothing in the minds 
of their parents that should awe them into deference, 
the most important difference left between them is that 
of physical strength. The children, if of hardy dispo- 
sition, to which they are perhaps trained in battles with 
their juvenile rivals, soon show a certain degree of dar- 
ing against their superior strength. And as the differ- 
ence lessens, and by the time it has nearly ceased, what 
is so natural as that they should assume equality, in 
manners and in following their own will ? But equality 
assumed where there should be subordination, inevita- 
bly involves contempt toward the party in defiance of 
whom it is asserted. 

The relative condition of such parents as they sink 
in old age, is most deplorable. And all that has pre- 
ceded, leads by a natural course to that consequence 
which we have sometimes beheld, with feelings em- 
phatically gloomy, — the almost perfect indifference with 
which the descendants, and a few other relations, of a 
poor old man of this class, could consign him to the 
grave. A human being was gone out of the world, a 
being they had been with or near all their lives, some 
of them sustained in their childhood by his labors, and 
yet perhaps not one heart, at any moment, felt the 

sentiment — I have lost . They never could regard 

him with respect, and their miserable education had not 
14 



158 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

taught them humanity enough to regard him in his 
declining days as an object of pity. Some decency of 
attention was perhaps shown him, or perhaps hardly 
that, in his last hours. His being now a dead, instead 
of a living man, was a burden taken off ; and the insen- 
sibility and levity, somewhat disturbed and repressed 
at the sight of his expiring struggle, and of his being 
lowered into the grave, recovered by the day after his 
interment, if not on the very same evening, their ac- 
customed tone, never more to be interrupted by the 
effect of any remembrance of him. Such a closing 
scene one day to be repeated is foreshown to us, when 
we look at an ignorant and thoughtless father sur- 
rounded by his untaught children. In the silence of 
thought we thus accost him, — The event which will 
take you finally from among them, perhaps after forty 
or fifty years of intercourse with them, will leave no 
more impression on their affections, than the cutting 
down of a decayed old tree in the neighborhood of 
your habitation. 

There are instances, of rare occurrence, when such 
a man becomes, late in life, far too late for his family 
to have the benefit of the change, a subject of the only 
influence which could awake him to earnest thought- 
fulness and the full sensibility of conscience. When 
the sun thus breaks out toward the close of his gloomy 
day, and when, in the energy of his new life, he puts 
forth the best efforts of his untaught spirit for a little 
divine knowledge, to be a lamp to him in entering 
ere long the shades of death, with what bitter regrets 
he looks back to the period when a number of human 
beings, some perhaps still with him, some now scattered 
from him, and here and there pursuing their separate 
courses in careless ignorance, were growing up under 
his roof, within his charge, but in utter estrangement 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 159 

from all discipline adapted to ensure a happier sequel. 
His distressing reflection is often representing to him 
what they might now have been if they had grown 
up under such discipline. And gladly would he lay 
down his life to redeem for them but some inferior 
share of what the season for imparting to them is gone 
forever. 

Another thing is to be added, to this representation 
of the evils attendant on an uncultivated state of the 
people, namely — that this mental rudeness puts them 
decidedly out of beneficial communication ivith the supe- 
rior and cultivated classes. 

We are assuming (with permission) that a national 
community should be constituted for the good of all 
its parts, not to be obtained by them as detached, inde- 
pendent portions, but adjusted and compacted into one 
social body ; an economy in which all the parts shall 
feel they have the benefit of an amicable combination ; 
in other words, that they are the better for one an- 
other. But it can be no such constitution when the 
most palpable relations between the two main divisions 
of society consist of such direct opposites as refinement 
and barbarism, dignity and gross debasement, intelli- 
gence and ignorance ; which are the distinctions asserted 
by the higher classes as putting a vast distance between 
them and the lower. If so little of the correct under- 
standing, the information, the liberalized feeling, and 
the propriety of deportment, which we are to ascribe to 
the higher and cultivated portion, goes downward into 
the lower, it should seem impossible but there must 
be more of repulsion than of amicable disposition and 
communication between them. We may suspect, per- 
haps, that those more privileged classes are not gener- 
ally desirous that the interval were much less wide, 
provided that without cultivation of the lower orders 



160 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the nuisance of their annoying and formidah/e temper 
could be abated. But however that may be, it is ex- 
ceedingly desirable, for the good of both, that the upper 
and inferior orders should be on terms of communica- 
tion and mutual good- will, and therefore that there 
should be a diminution of that rudeness of mind and 
habits which must contribute to keep them alienated 
and hostile. 

If it were asked what communication, at all of a na- 
ture to be described by epithets of social and friendly 
import, we can be supposing by possibility to subsist 
between, classes so different and distant/ we may exem- 
plify it by such an instance as we have now and then 
the pleasure of seeing. Each reader also, of any mod- 
erate compass of observation, may probably recollect 
an example, in the case of some man in humble station, 
but who has had (for his condition) a good education ; 
having been well instructed in his youth in the ele- 
ments of useful knowledge ; having had good principles 
diligently inculcated upon him; having subsequently 
instructed himself, to the best of his very confined 
means and opportunity, through a habit of reading ; 
and being in his manners unaffectedly observant of all 
the decorums of a respectable human being. It has 
been seen, that such a man has not found in some of 
his superiors in station and attainment any disposition 
to shun him ; and has not felt in himself or his situa- 
tion any reason why he should seek to shun them. 
He would occasionally fall into conversation with the 
wealthy and accomplished proprietor, or the profes- 
sional man of learning, in the neighborhood. His in- 
telligent manner of attending to what they said, his 
perfect understanding of the language naturally used by 
cultivated persons, the considerateness and pertinence 
of his replies, and the modest deference, combined with 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 161 

an honest freedom in making his observations on the 
matters brought in question, pleased those persons 
of superior rank, and induced various friendly and 
useful attentions, on their part to him and his family. 
He and his family thus experienced a direct benefit 
of superior sense, civility, and good principle, in a 
humble condition; and were put under a new respon- 
sibility to preserve a character for those distinctions. — 
Now think of the incalculable advantage to society, 
if anything approaching to this were the general state 
of social relation between the lower and the higher 
orders. 

On the contrary, there is no medium of complacent 
communication between the classes of higher condition 
and endowment, and an ignorant, coarse populace. 
Except on occasion of giving orders or magisterial re- 
bukes, the gentleman will never think of -such a thing 
as converse with the clowns in his vicinity. They, on 
their part, are desirous to avoid him; excepting when 
any of them may have a purpose to gain, by arresting 
his attention, with an ungainly cringe ; or when some 
of those who have no sort of present dependence on 
him, are disposed to cross his way with a look and 
strut of rudeness, to show how little they care for him. 
The servility, and the impudence, almost equally repress 
in him all friendly disposition toward a voluntary in- 
tercourse with the class. There is thus as complete a 
dissociation between the two orders, as mutual dislike, 
added to every imaginable dissimilarity, can create. And 
this broad ungracious separation intercepts all modify- 
ing influence that might otherwise have passed, from 
the intelligence and refinement of the one, upon the 
barbarism of the other. 

But there is in human nature a pertinacious disposi- 
tion to work disadvantages, in one way or other, into 
14* 



162 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

privileges. The people, in being thus consigned to a 
low and alien ground, in relation to the cultivated part 
of society, are put in possession, as it were, of a terri- 
tory of their own ; where they can give their disposi- 
tion freer play, and act out their characters in their own 
manner; exempt equally from the voluntary and the 
involuntary influence of the cultivated superiors ; that 
is to say, neither insensibly modified by the attraction 
of what is the most laudable in them as a pattern, nor 
swayed through policy to a studied accommodation to 
their understood opinion and will. This is a great 
emancipation enjoyed by the inferiors. And how- 
ever injurious it may be, it is one of which they will 
not fail to take the full license. For in all things and 
situations, it is one of the first objects with human 
beings, to verify experimentally the presumed extent of 
their liberty and privilege. In this dissociation, the 
people are rid of the many salutary restraints and in- 
citements which they would have been made to feel, 
if on terms of friendly recognition with the respectable 
part of the community ; they have neither honor nor 
disgrace, from that quarter, to take into their account ; 
and this contributes to extinguish all sense and care of 
respectability of character, — a care to which there will 
be no motive in any consideration of what they may, as 
among themselves, think of one another; for, with the 
low estimate which they mutually and justly entertain, 
there is a conventional feeling among them that, for the 
ease and privilege of them all, they are systematically 
to set aside all high notions and nice responsibilities of 
character and conduct. There is a sort of recognized 
mutual right to be no better than they are. And an 
individual among them affecting a high conscientious 
principle would be apt to incur ridicule, as a man fool- 
ishly divesting himself of a privilege ; — unless, indeed, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 163 

he let them understand that hypocrisy was his way of 
maintaining that privilege, and turning it to account. 

The people are thus, by their ignorance, and what 
inseparably attends it, far removed and estranged from 
the more cultivated part of their fellow-countrymen; 
and consequently from every beneficial influence under 
which a state of friendly contiguity, if we may so ex- 
press it, would have placed them. Let us now see 
what, in this abandonment to themselves, are their 
growing dispositions toward the superior orders and 
the existing arrangements of the community ; disposi- 
tions which are promoted by causes more definite than 
this estrangement considered merely as the negation of 
benevolent intercourse, but to which it mightily con • 
tributes. 

Times may have been when the great mass, while 
placed in such decided separation from the upper orders, 
combined such a quietude with their ignorance, that 
they had little other than submissive feelings toward 
these superiors, whose property, almost, for all service 
and obsequiousness, they were accustomed to consider 
themselves ; when no question would occur to them 
why there should be so vast a difference of condition 
between beings of the same race ; when no other proof 
was required of the right appointment of their lot, how- 
ever humble it might be, than their being, and their 
forefathers having been, actually in it ; and when they 
did not presume, hardly in thought, to make any infer- 
ences from the fact of the immense disproportion of 
numbers and consequent physical strength between 
them and their superiors. * But the times of this per- 

* Here, however, it should be observed that in the former age, 
when there was far less of jealous invidious feeling between the 
upper and lower classes than has latterly intervened, there was 
a more amicable manner of intercommunication. The settled 



164 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

feet, unquestioning, unmurmuring succumbency under 
the actual allotment have passed away ; except in such 
regions as the Russian empire, where they have yet 
long to continue. In other states of Europe, but espe- 
cially in our own, the ignorance of the people has no- 
where prevented them from acquiring a sense of their 
strength and importance ; with a certain ill-conceived, 
but stimulant notion, of some change which they think 
ought to take place in their condition. How, indeed, 
should it have been possible for them to remain una- 
ware of this strength and importance, while the whole 
civilized world was shaken with a practical and tremen- 
dous controversy between the two grand opposed or- 
ders of society, concerning their respective rights ; or 
that they should not have taken a strong, and from the 
rudeness of their mental condition, a fierce interest, in the 
principle and progress of the strife ? And how should 
they have failed to know that, during this controversy, 
innumerable persons raised from the lower rank by tal- 
ent and spirit, had left no place on earth except in 
courts (and hardly even there) for the dotage of fancy- 
ing some innate difference between the classes distin- 
guished in the artificial order of society ? 

The effect of all this is gone deep into the minds of 
great numbers who are not excited, in consequence, to 
any worthy exertion for raising themselves, individu- 
ally, from their degraded condition, b} r the earnest ap- 
plication and improvement of their means and faculties. 
The feeling of many of them seems to be, that they 
must and will sullenly abide by the ill-starred -fate of 
their order, till some great comprehensive alteration in 
their favor shall absolve them from that bond of hostile 

and perfectly recognized state of subordination precluded on the 
one side, all apprehension of encroachment, and on the other the 
disposition to it. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 165 

sentiment, in which they make common cause against 
the superior classes ; and shall create a state of things 
in which it shall be worth while for the individual to 
make an effort to raise himself. We can at best, (they 
seem to say,) barely maintain, with the utmost difficul- 
ty, a miserable life ; and you talk to us of cultivation, 
of discipline, of moral respectability, of efforts to come 
out from our degraded rank ! No. we shall even stay 
where we are ; till it is seen how the question is to be 
settled between the people of our sort, and those who 
will have it that they are of a far worthier kind. There 
may then, perhaps, be some chance for such as we ; 
and if not, the less we are disturbed about improvement, 
knowledge, and all those things, the better, while we 
are bearing the heavy load a few years, to die like 
those before us. 

We said they are banded in a hostile sentiment. It 
is true, that among such a degraded populace there is 
very little kindness, or care for one another's interests. 
They all know too well what they all are not, to feel 
mutual esteem or benevolence. 

But it is infinitely easier for any set of human beings 
to maintain a community of feeling in hostility to some- 
thing else, than in benevolence toward another ; for 
here no sacrifice is required of any one's self-interest. 
And it is certain, that the subordinate portions of soci- 
ety have come to regard the occupants of the tracts of 
fertility and sunshine, the possessors of opulence, splen- 
dor, and luxury, with a deep, settled, systematic aver- 
sion; with a disposition to contemplate in any other 
light than that of a calamity art extensive downfal of 
the favorites of fortune, when a brooding imagination 
figures such a thing as possible ; and with but very slight 
monitions from conscience of the iniquity of the most 
tumultuary accomplishment of such a catastrophe. In a 



166 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

word, so far from considering their own welfare as iden- 
tified with the stability of the existing social order, they 
consider it as something that would spring from the 
ruin of that order. The greater number of them have 
lost that veneration by habit, partaking of the nature 
of a superstition, which had been protracted downward, 
though progressively attenuated with the lapse of time, 
from the feudal ages into the last century. They have 
quite lost, too, in this disastrous age, that sense of com- 
petence and possible well-being, which might have 
harmonized their feelings with a social economy that 
would have allowed them the enjoyment of such a 
state, even as the purchase of great industry and care. 
Whatever the actual economy may have of wisdom in 
its institutions, and of splendor, and fulness of all good 
things, in some parts of its apportionment, they feel 
that what is allotted to most of them in its arrange- 
ments is pressing hardship, unremitting poverty, grow- 
ing still more hopeless with the progress of time, and 
of what they hear trumpeted as national glory, nay, 
even " national prosperity and happiness unrivalled." 
This bitter experience, which inevitably becomes asso- 
ciated in their thoughts with that frame of society 
under which they suffer it, will naturally have a far 
stronger effect on their opinion of that system than all 
that had ever rendered them acquiescent or reverential 
toward it. That it brings no relief, or promise of relief, 
is a circumstance preponderating in the estimate, against 
all that can be said of its ancient establishment, its 
theoretical excellences, or the blessings in which it 
may be pretended to have once abounded, or still to 
abound. What were become of the most essential 
laws of human feeling, if such experience could leave 
those who are undergoing its discipline still faithfully 
attached to the social order on the strength of its con- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 167 

secration by time, and of the former settled opinions in 
its favor, — however tenacious the impressions so wrought 
into habit are admitted to be ? And the minds of the 
people thus thrown loose from their former ties, are 
not arrested and recovered by any substitutional ones 
formed while those were decaying. They are not re- 
tained in a temper of patient endurance and adherence, 
by the bond of principles which a sedulous and deep 
instruction alone could have enforced on them. The 
growth of sound judgment under such instruction, 
might have made them capable of understanding how 
a proportion of the evil may have been inevitable, from 
uncontrollable causes ; of perceiving that it could not 
fail to be aggravated by a disregard of prudence in the 
proceedings in early life among their own class, and 
that so far it were unjust to impute it to their supe- 
riors or to the order of society ; of admitting that na- 
tional calamities are visitations of divine judgment, of 
which they were to reflect whether they had not de- 
served a heavy share ; of feeling it to be therefore no 
impertinent or fanatical admonition that should exhort 
them to repentance and reformation, as an expedient 
for the amendment of even their temporal condition ; 
and of clearly comprehending that, at all events, rancor, 
violence, and disorder, cannot be the way to alleviate 
any of the evils, but to aggravate them all. But, we 
repeat it, there are millions in this land, and if we in- 
clude the neighboring island politically united to it, 
very many millions, who have received no instruction 
adequate, in the smallest degree, to counteract the 
natural effect of the distresses of their condition ; or to 
create a class of moral restraints and mitigations in 
prevention of a total hostility of feeling against the 
established order, after the ancient attachments to it 



168 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

have been worn down by the innovations of opinion, 
and the pressure of continued distress. 

Thus uninstructed to apprehend the considerations 
adapted to impose a moral restraint, thus unmodified 
by principles of mitigation, there is a large proportion 
of human strength and feeling not in vital combination 
with the social system, but aloof from it, looking at it 
with "gloomy and malign regard ;■" in a state progres- 
sive towards a fitness to be impelled against it with a 
dreadful shock, in the event of any great convulsion, 
that should set loose the legion of daring, desperate, 
and powerful spirits, to fire and lead the masses to its 
demolition. There have not been wanting examples to 
show with what fearful effect this hostility may come 
into action, in the crisis of the fate of a nation's ancient 
system ; where this alienated portion of its own people, 
rushing in, have revenged upon it the neglect of their 
tuition ; that neglect which had abandoned them to so 
utter a "lack of knowledge," that they really under- 
stood no better than to expect their own solid advan- 
tage in general havoc and disorder. But how bereft 
of sense the State too must be, that would thus let a 
multitude of its people grow up in a condition of mind 
to believe, that the sovereign expedient for their welfare 
is to be found in spoliation and destruction ! It might 
easily have comprehended what it was reasonable to 
expect from the matured dispositions and strength of 
such of its children as it abandoned to be nursed by 
the wolf. 

While this principle of ruin was working on by a 
steady and natural process, this supposed infatuated 
State was, it is extremely possible, directing its chief 
care to maintain the splendor of a court, or to extort 
the means for prosecuting some object of vain and 
wicked ambition, some project of conquest and military 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 169 

glory. And probably nothing could have appeared to 
many of its privileged persons more idle and ridiculous, 
or to others of them more offensive and ill-intentioned, 
than a remonstrance founded on a warning of such a 
consequence. The despisers would have been incom- 
parably the greater number ; and, " Go (they would 
have said) with your mock-tragical fortune-telling, to 
whoever can believe, too, that one day or other the 
quadrupeds of our stalls and meadows may be suddenly 
inspirited by some supernatural possession to turn their 
strength on us in a mass, or those of our kennels to 
imitate the dogs of Actaeon." 
25 



SECTION IV. 



There may be persons ready to make a question here, 
whether it be so certain tha£ giving the people of the 
lower order more knowledge, and sharpening their 
faculties, will really tend to the preservation of good 
order. Would not such improvement elate them, to a 
most extravagant estimate of their own worth and 
importance ; and therefore result in insufferable arro- 
gance, both in the individuals and the class ? Would 
they not, on the strength of it, be continually assuming 
to sit in judgment on the proceedings and claims of 
their betters, even in the most lofty stations ; and de- 
manding their own pretended rights, with a trouble- 
some and turbulent pertinacity? Would they not, 
since their improvement cannot, from their condition in 
life, be large and deep, be in just such a half taught 
state, as would make them exactly fit to be wrought 
upon by all sorts of crafty schemers, fierce declaimers, 
empirics, and innovators? Is it not, in short, too 
probable that, since an increase of mental power is 
available to bad uses as well as good, the results would 
greatly preponderate on the side of evil ? 

It would be curious to observe how objections so 
plausible, so decisive in the esteem of those who ad- 

v. Hmrn, would sound if expressed in other terms. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 171 

Let them be put in the form of such sentences and 
propositions as the following : — Though understanding 
is to be men's guide to right conduct, the less of it they 
possess the more safe are we against their going wrong. 
The duty of a human being has many branches ; there 
are connected with all of them various general and 
special considerations, to induce and regulate the per- 
formance ; it must be well for these to be defined with 
all possible clearness ; and it is also well for the great 
majority of men to be utterly incapable of apprehending 
them with any such definiteness. It is desirable that 
the rule, or set of rules, by which the demeanor of 
the lower orders toward those above them is to be 
directed, should appear to them reasonable as well as 
distinctly defined ; but let us take the greatest care that 
their reason shall be in no state of fitness to perceive 
this rectitude of the rules. It would be a noble thins; 
to have a competent understanding of all that belongs 
to human interest and duty ; and therefore the next 
best thing is to be retained very nearly in ignorance of 
all. It would be a vast advantage to proceed a hun- 
dred degrees on the scale of knowledge ; but the ad- 
vantage is nowhere in the progress ; each of the degrees 
is in itself worth nothing ; nay, less than nothing ; for 
unless a man could attain all, he had better stop at two 
or one, than advance to four, six, or ten. Truths sup- 
port one another; by the conjunction of several each 
is kept the clearer in the understanding, the more effi- 
cient for its proper use, and the more adequate to resist 
the pressure of the surrounding ignorance and delusion; 
therefore let there be the greatest caution that we do 
not give to three truths in a man's understanding the 
aid of a fourth, or four the aid of a fifth; let the 
garrison be so diminutive that its successful resistance 
to the siege must be a miracle. The reader will be 



1*12 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

in little danger of excess in shaping into as many 
forms of absurdity as he pleases a notion which goes 
to the depreciation of the desire and use of truth, of 
all that has been venerated as wisdom, of the divine 
revelation of knowledge, and of our rational nature 
itself. 

If it be a rational nature that the lower ranks possess 
as well as the superior, one should have imagined it 
must be in the highest degree important that they, as 
well as their superiors, should habitually make their 
duty and conduct a matter of thought, of intelligent 
consideration, instead of going through it mechanically, 
or with little more than a brute accommodation of what 
they do to a customary and imposed manner of doing 
it; but this thoughtful way of acting will never prevail 
among them, while they are unexercised in that thinking 
which (generally speaking) men will never acquire but 
in the exercise of gaining knowledge. It were, again, 
better, one would think, that they should be capable of 
seeing some reason and use in gradations and unequal 
distributions in the community, than be left to regard 
it as all a matter of capricious or iniquitous fortune, to 
their allotment under which there is no reason for sub- 
mission but a bare necessity. The improvement of 
understanding by which we are wishing to raise them 
in this humble allotment, without carrying them from 
the ground where it is placed, will explain to them the 
best compensations of their condition, will show them 
it is no essential degradation, and point them to the 
true respectability which may be obtained in it. And 
even if they should be a little too much elated with the 
supposed attainments, (while the flattering possession 
is yet new, and far from general in their class,) what 
taste would it be in their superiors not to deem this 
itself a far better thing than the contented, or more 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 173 

probably insolent and malignant, grossness of a stupid 
vulgarity ? — as some little excess of self-complacency 
in appearing in a handsome dress is accounted much 
less disgusting than a careless self-exposure in filth and 
rags. 

As to their being rendered liable by more knowledge 
to be caught by declaimers, projectors, and agitators, 
we may confidently ask, whether it be the natural effect 
of more knowledge and understanding to be less sus- 
picious of cajoling professions, less discerning of what 
is practicable and impracticable, and more credulous to 
extravagant doctrines, and wild theories and schemes. 
Is it the well-instructed and intelligent poor man that 
believes the demagogue who may assert or insinuate that, 
if things were ordered right, all men might live in the 
greatest plenty? Or if we advert to those of the 
lower order whom a diminutive freehold or other 
qualification may entitle to vote for a member of parlia- 
ment, is it the well-instructed and intelligent man 
among them that is duped by the candidate's professions 
of kind solicitude for him and his family, accompanied 
with smiling equivocal hints that it may be of more 
advantage than he is aware for a man who has sons to 
provide for, to have a friend who has access and 
interest in a certain high quarter ? Nor is it among 
the best instructed and most thinking part of the 
subordinate class, that we shall find persons capable of 
believing that a community might, if those who govern 
it so pleased, be rich and prosperous by other means 
than a general industry in ordinary employments. 

If, again, it is apprehended that a great increase of 
intelligence among the people would destroy their 
deference and respectful deportment toward their 
superiors, the ground of this apprehension should be 
honestly assigned. If the claim to this respect bo 
15* 



174 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

definable, and capable of being enforced upon good 
reasons, it is obvious that improved sense in the people 
will better appreciate them. Especially, if the claim is 
to owe any part of its validity to higher mental quali- 
fications in the claimants, it will so far be incomparably 
better understood, and if it be valid, far more respected 
than it is now. By having a measure of knowledge, 
and of the power anci practice of thinking, the people 
would be enabled to form some notion of what it must 
be, and what it is worth, to have a great deal more of 
these endowments. They would observe and under- 
stand the indications of this ampler possession in the 
minds of those above them, and so would be aware of 
the great disparity between themselves and those supe- 
riors. And since they would value themselves on their 
comparatively small share of these mental advantages, 
(for this is the very point of the objection against their 
attaining them,) they would be compelled to estimate 
by the same scale the persons dignified by so far 
surpassing a share of this admired wealth. Whereas 
an ignorant populace can understand nothing at all 
about the matter ; they have no guess at the great dis- 
parity, nor impression of its importance ; so that with 
them the cultivated superiors quite lose the weight of 
this grand difference, and can obtain none of the 
respect which they may deserve on account of it. The 
objection against enlightening the lower classes appears 
so remarkably absurd as viewed in this direction, that 
it might tempt us to suspect a motive not avowed. It 
is just the sort of caveat to be uttered by persons aware 
that themselves, or many of their class, might happen 
to betray to the sharpened inspection of a more intel- 
ligent people, that a higher ground in the allotments of 
fortune is no certain pledge for a superior rank of mind. 
It were strange, very strange indeed, if persons com* 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 175 

bining with superior station a great mental superiority, 
should be content, while claiming the deference of the 
subordinate part of the community around them, that 
this high distinction should go for nothing in that 
claim, and that the required respect should be paid only 
in reverence of the number of their acres, the size of 
their houses, the elegance of their equipage and domestic 
arrangements, and perhaps some official capacity, in 
which many a notorious blockhead has strutted and 
blustered. 

We think such considerations as the above, opposed 
to the objection that any very material cultivation of 
the minds of the common people would destroy their 
industry in ordinary employments, their contentment 
with their station, and their respectful demeanor to 
their superiors ; and would render them arrogant, dis- 
orderly, factious, liable to be caught by wild notions, 
misled by declaimers and impostors, and, in short, all 
the worse for being able to understand their duty and 
interest the better, ought to go far toward convicting 
that objection of great folly, — not to apply terms of 
stronger imputation. 

But we need not have dwelt so long on such argu- 
ments, since fortunately there is matter of fact in an- 
swer to the objection. To the extent of the yet very 
limited experiment, it is proved that giving the people 
more knowledge and more sense does not tend to dis- 
order and insubordination; does not excite them to 
impatience and extravagant claims ; does not spoil 
them for the ordinary business of life, the tasks of 
duty and necessity ; does not make them the dupes of 
knaves ; nor teach them the most profitable use of their 
improved faculties is to turn knaves themselves. Em- 
ployers can testify, from all sides, that there is a strik- 
ing general difference between those bred up in igno- 



176 ON POPTTEAR IGNORANCE. 

ranee and rude vulgarity, and those who have been 
trained through the well-ordered schools for the humble 
classes, especially when the habits at home have been 
subsidiary; a difference exceedingly in favor of the 
latter, who are found not only more apt at understand- 
ing and executing, but more decorous, more respectful, 
more attentive to orders, more ready to see and acknowl- 
edge the propriety of good regulations, and more dis- 
posed to a practical acquiescence in them; far less 
inclined to ebriety and low company ; and more to be 
depended on in point of honesty. In almost any part 
of the country, where the experiment has been zealously 
prosecuted for a moderate number of years, a long res- 
ident observer can discern a modification in the charac- 
ter of the neighborhood ; a mitigation of the former 
brutality of manners, a less frequency of brawls and 
quarrels, and less tendency to draw together into rude 
riotous assemblages. There is especially a marked 
difference on the Sabbath, on which great numbers 
attend public worship, whose forefathers used on that 
day to congregate for boisterous sport on the common, 
or even within the inclosure vainly consecrated round 
the church ;* and who would themselves in all proba- 
bility have followed the same course, but for the tuition 
which has led them into a better. In not a few in- 
stances, the children have carried from the schools 
inestimable benefits home to their unhappy families ; 
winning even their depraved, thoughtless parents into 
consideration and concern about their most important 
interests, — a precious repayment of all the long toils 
and cares, endured to support them through the period 

* "We know a church where, within the remembrance of an im- 
mediate ancestor, it was not unusual, or thought anything amiss, 
for the foot-ball to be struck up within the " consecrated ground" 
at the close of the afternoon service of the Sunday. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 177 

of childhood, and an example of that rare class of phe- 
nomena, in which (as in the instance of the Grecian 
Daughter) a superlative beauty arises from an inversion 
of the order of nature. 

Even the frightful statements of the increase, in 
recent years, of active juvenile depravity, especially in 
the metropolis, include a gratifying testimony in favor 
of education — at least did so some years since. The 
result of special inquiries, of extensive compass, into 
the wretched history of juvenile reprobates, has forti- 
fied the promoters of schools with evidence that it was 
not from these seminaries that such noxious creatures 
were to go out, to exemplify that the improvement of 
intelligence may be but the greater aptitude for fraud 
and mischief. No, it was found to have been in very 
different places of resort, that these wretches had been, 
almost from their infancy, accomplished for crime ; and 
that their training had not taken or needed any assist- 
ance from an exercise on literary rudiments, from Bi- 
bles, catechisms, or religious and moral poetry, or from 
an attendance on public worship. Indeed, as if Prov- 
idence had designed that the substantial utility should 
be accompanied with a special circumstance to con- 
found the cavillers, the children and youth of the 
schools were found to have been more generally pre- 
served from falling into the class of premature delin- 
quents, than a moral calculator, keeping in sight the 
quality of human nature and the immediate pressure 
of so much temptation, would have ventured to an- 
ticipate, upon the moderate estimate of the efficacy of 
instruction. 

Experience equally falsifies the notion that knowl- 
edge, imparted to the lower orders, beyond what is 
necessary to the handling of their tools, tends to fac- 
tious turbulence ; to an impatience (from the instigation 



178 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of certain wild theories,) under law and regular govern- 
ment in society. The maintainers of which notion 
should also affirm, that the people of Scotland have 
been to this day about the most disaffected, tumultuary, 
revolutionary rabble in Europe ; and that the Cornish 
miners, now so worthily distinguished at once by ex- 
ercised intellect and religion, are incessantly on the 
point of insurrection, against their employers or the 
state. And we shall be just as ready to believe them, 
if they also assert, that, in those popular irregularities 
which have too often disturbed, in particular places, 
the peace of our country, the clamorous bands or 
crowds, collected for purposes of intimidation or demo- 
lition, have consisted chiefly of the better instructed 
part of the poorer inhabitants ; — yes, or that this class 
furnished one in twenty or fifty of the numbers forming 
such lawless bands ; even though many of these more 
instructed of the people might be suffering, with their 
families, the extremity of want, the craving of hunger, 
which, no less than " oppression," may " make a wise 
man mad." Many of these, in their desolate abodes, 
with tears of parents and children mingled together, 
have been committing themselves to their Father in 
heaven, at the time that the ruder part of the popula- 
tion have been carrying alarm, and sometimes mischief, 
through the district, and so confirming the faith, we 
may suppose, of sundry magnates of the neighborhood, 
who had vehemently asserted, a few years before, the 
pernicious tendency of educating the people.* 

* What proportion were found to have been educated, in the 
very lowest sense of the term, of the burners of ricks and barns 
in the south-eastern counties, a few years since ? "What propor- 
tion of the ferocious, fanatical, and sanguinary rout who, the other 
day, near the centre of the metropolitan see of Canterbury, were 
brought into action by the madman Thom, alias Sir W. Courte 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 179 

It would be less than what is due to suffering human- 
ity, to leave this topic without observing, that if a nu- 
merous division of the community should be sinking 
under severe, protracted, unmitigated distress, distress 
on which there appears to them no dawn of hope from 
ordinary causes, it is not to be held a disparagement to 
the value of education, if some of those who have en- 
joyed a measure of that advantage, in common with a 
greater number who have not, should become feverishly 
agitated with imaginations of great sudden changes in 
the social system ; and be led to entertain suggestions 
of irregular violent expedients for the removal of insup- 
portable evils. It must, in all reason, be acknowledged 
the last lesson which education could be expected to 
teach with practical effect, that one part of the com- 
munity should be willing to resign themselves to a pre- 
mature mortality, that the others may live in sufficiency 
and tranquillity. Such heroic devotement might not be 
difficult in the sublime elation of Thermopylae ; but it is 
a very different matter in a melancholy cottage, and in 
the midst of famishing children.* 

After thus referring to matter of fact, for contradic- 
tion of the notion, that the mental cultivation of the 
lower classes might render them less subject to the rules 

nay ; stout, well-fed, proud Englishmen — Englishmen " the glory 
of all lands," who were capable of believing that madman a 
divine personage, Christ himself, invulnerable, till the fact hap- 
pened otherwise, and then were confident he would come to life 
again ? When will the Government adopt some effectual means 
to avert from the nation the infamy of having such a populace in 
any part of the country, and especially such a part of it ? 

* This was almost the desperate cqndition of numberless fam- 
ilies in this country at a period of which they, or the survivors 
of them, retain in memory an indelible record ; and we think it 
right to retain here also that record. While thankful for all sub 
s&quent amendment, we say again, Look at Ireland. 



180 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of good order, we have to say, in further reply, that 
we are not heard insisting on the advantages of in- 
creased knowledge and mental invigoration among the 
people, unconnected with the inculcation of religion. 

Undoubtedly, the zealous friends of popular educa- 
tion account knowledge valuable absolutely, as being 
the apprehension of things as they are ; a prevention 
of delusion; and so far a fitness for right volitions. 
But they consider religion, (besides being itself the pri- 
mary and infinitely the most important part of knowl- 
edge,) as a principle indispensable for securing the full 
benefit of all the rest. It is desired, and endeavored, 
that the understandings of these opening minds may 
be taken possession of by just and solemn ideas of their 
relation to the Eternal Almighty Being ; that they may 
be taught to apprehend it as an awful reality, that they 
are perpetually under his inspection ; and as a certainty, 
that they must at length appear before him in judg- 
ment, and find, in another life, the consequences of what 
they are in spirit and conduct here. It is to be im- 
pressed on them, that his will is the supreme law ; that 
nis declarations are the most momentous truth known 
on earth ; and his favor and condemnation the greatest 
good and evil. Under an ascendency of this divine 
wisdom it is, that their discipline in any other knowl- 
edge is designed to be conducted ; so that nothing in 
the mode of their instruction may have a tendency con- 
trary to it, and everything be taught in a manner re- 
cognizing the relation with it, as far as shall consist with 
a natural, unforced way of keeping this relation in view. 
Thus it is sought to be secured that, as the pupil's 
mind grows stronger and multiplies its resources, and 
he therefore has necessarily more power and means 
for what is wrong, there may be luminously pre- 
>mted to him, as if celestial eyes visibly beamed upon 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 181 

him, the most solemn ideas that can enforce what is 
right. 

Such is the discipline meditated, for preparing the 
subordinate classes to pursue their individual welfare, 
and act their part as members of the community.— 
They are. to be trained in early life to diligent employ- 
ment of their faculties, tending to strengthen them, 
regulate them, and give their possessors the power of 
effectually usin^ them. They are to be exercised to 
form clear, correct notions, instead of crude, vague, de- 
lusive ones. The subjects of these ideas will be, a very 
considerable number of the most important facts and 
principles ; which are to be presented to their under- 
standings with a patient repetition of efforts to fix 
them there as knowledge that cannot be forgotten. 
By this measure of actual acquirement, and by the habit 
formed in so acquiring, they will be qualified for mak- 
ing further attainment in future time, if disposed to im- 
prove their opportunities. During this progress, and 
in connection with many of its exercises, their duty is 
to be inculcated on them in the various forms in which 
they will have to make a choice between right and 
wrong, in their conduct toward society. There will be 
reiteration of lessons on justice, prudence, inoffensive- 
ness, love of peace, estrangement from the counsels and 
leagues of vain and bad men ; hatred of disorder and 
violence, a sense of the necessity of authoritative pub- 
lic institutions to prevent these evils, and respect for 
them while honestly administered to this end. All this 
is to be taught, in many instances directly, in others by 
reference for confirmation, from the Holy Scriptures, 
from which authority will also be impressed, all the 
while, the principles of religion. And religion, while 
its grand concern is with the state of the soul towards 
16 



182 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

God and eternal interests, yet takes every principle and 
rule of morals under its peremptory sanction ; making 
the primary obligation and responsibility be towards 
God, of everything that is a duty with respect to men. 
So that, with the subjects of this education, the sense 
of propriety shall be conscience ; the consideration of 
how they ought to be regulated in their conduct as a 
part of the community, shall be the recollection that 
their Master in heaven dictates the laws of that con- 
duct, and will judicially hold them amenable for every 
part of it. 

And is not a discipline thus addressed to the pur- 
pose of fixing religious principles in ascendency, a» 
far as that difficult object is within the power of disci- 
pline, and of infusing a salutary tincture of them into 
whatever else is taught, the right way to bring up citi- 
zens faithful to all that deserves fidelity in the social 
compact ? 

But perhaps far less of sacred knowledge than all 
this pleading admits and assumes to be indispensable 
to them, will answer the end. For it is but a slender 
quantity of it that is, in effect, proposed to be imparted 
to them by those who would give them very little other 
knowledge. They will talk of giving the people an 
education specifically religious ; a training to conduct 
them on through a close avenue, looking straight before 
them to descry distant spiritual objects, while shut out 
from all the scene right and left, by fences that tell them 
there is nothing that concerns them there. There may 
be rich and beautiful fields of knowledge, but they are 
not to be trampled by vulgar feet. 

Now, may we presume that by knowledge, or infor- 
mation, is meant a clear understanding of a subject ? 
If so, it is but little religious information that can be 
imparted while that of a more general nature is with- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 183 

held. The case is so, partly because, in order to a clear 
conception of the principal things in the doctrine of 
religion, the mind wants facts, principles, associations 
of ideas, and modes of applying its thoughts, which 
are to be acquired from the consideration of various 
other subjects ; and partly because, even though it aid 
not, and though it were practicable to understand reli- 
gious truths clearly without the subsidiary ideas, and 
the disciplined mental habit acquired in attention to 
other subjects, it is flatly contrary to the radical disposi- 
tion of human nature that youthful spirits should yield 
themselves to a bare exclusively religious discipline. 
It were supposing a reversal of the natural taste and 
tendency, to expect them to apply their attention so 
patiently, so willingly, so long, and with such interest, 
to this one subject, as to be brought to an intelligent 
apprehension through the almost sole exercise of think- 
ing on this. By thinking on this ! — which is the sub- 
ject on which they are by their very nature the least 
of all inclined to think ; the subject on which it is the 
most difficult as well as the most important point in 
education to induce them to think ; the subject which, 
while it is essential to give it the ascendency in the in- 
struction of both the lower classes and all others, it re- 
quires so much care and address to present in an at- 
tractive light ; and which it is so desirable to combine 
with other subjects naturally more engaging, in order 
to bring it oftener by such associations into the thoughts, 
in that secondary manner, which causes somewhat less 
of recoil. 

It is curious to see what some persons can believe, or 
affect to believe, when reduced to a dilemma. On the 
one hand, they cannot endure the idea of any consider- 
able raising of the common people by mental improve- 
ment, in the general sense : that were ruin to social or- 



184 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

der. But then on the other, if it must not be plainly 
denied, that the said common people are of the very- 
same rational nature as the most elevated divisions of 
the race ; and that their essential worth must be in 
this spiritual thinking being, which worth is lost to 
them, if that being is sunk and degraded in gross igno- 
rance, it follows that some kind of cultivation is required. 
Well then ; we must give them some religious knowl- 
edge, unaccompanied by such other knowledge as would 
much more attractively invite them to exercise their 
minds, and it will be practicable and easy enough to 
engage their habitual attention to that very subject, al- 
most exclusively, to which the natural taste of the spe- 
cies is peculiarly averse. 

In exposing the absurdity of any scheme of educa- 
tion for the inferior classes, which should propose to 
make them intelligent about religion while intelligent 
about nothing else except their ordinary employments, 
we do not forget the instances now and then met with 
of pious poor men who, while very uncultivated in the 
general sense, evince a remarkable clearness of concep- 
tion on religious topics, and in the application of these 
topics to their duties as men and citizens. But " re- 
markable" we involuntarily call these phenomena, when- 
ever adverting to them. We naturally use some ex- 
pression importing a degree of wonder at such a fact. 
We think it a striking illustration of the power of reli- 
gion itself, and not of the power of religious instruc- 
tion. The extreme force with which the vital spirit has 
seized and actuated his faculties, has in a measure reme- 
died the incapacity he had otherwise been under of 
forming clear ideas of the subject. Even, however, 
while acknowledging and admiring this effect of a spe- 
cial influence from heaven, we still find ourselves invol- 
TK&arily surmising, in such an instance, that the man 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 185 

must also have been superior in natural capacity to the 
generality of ignorant persons ; so much out of the 
common course of things we account it for a man who 
knows so few things to know this one thing so well. 
We account it so from the settled conviction received 
through experience, that it is very unlikely a man igno- 
rant of almost all other things should well understand 
one subject, of a nature quite foreign to that of his or- 
dinary occupations. 

It is superfluous to observe, that such instances of a 
very considerable comprehension of religious truth, ob- 
tained in spite of what naturally makes so much against 
its being attainable, cannot affect the calculation when 
we are devising schemes which can only work accord- 
ing to natural laws and with ordinary powers. They 
who devise and apply them will rejoice at these evi- 
dences that there is an Agent who can open men's 
minds to the light of religion independently and in the 
absence of other intellectual advantages. But the 
question being how to bring the people, by the ordi- 
nary means of education, to a competent knowledge 
of religious truth, we have to consider what way of at- 
tempting to impart that knowledge may be the best fit- 
ted, at once to obviate the natural indisposition to the 
subject, and to provide that when it does obtain a place 
in £heir understanding, it shall not be a meagre, dimin- 
utive, insulated occupant there, but in its proper dimen- 
sions and relations. And if, in attentively studying 
this, there be any who come to ascertain, that the right 
expedient is a bare inculcation of religious instruction, 
disconnected, on system, from the illustrative aid of 
other knowledge, divested of the modification and at- 
traction of associated ideas derived from subjects less 
uncongenial with the natural feelings, — they really ra iy 
take the satisfaction of having ascertained one thing 
16* 



186 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

more, namely, that human nature has become at last so 
mightily changed, that it may be left to work itself 
right very soon, as to the affair of religion, with little 
further trouble of theirs. 

The special view in which we were pleading, on be- 
half of popular education, that religious instruction 
would form a material part of it, was, that this essen- 
tial ingredient would be a security against its being in- 
jurious to the good order and subordination in society. 
It is the more necessary to be particular on this, as 
some of those who have professed to lay much stress 
on the religious instruction of the people have seemed 
to have little further notion of the necessity or use of 
religion to the lower classes, than as merely a preserver 
of good order. In this character it has been insisted 
on by persons who avowed their aversion to every idea 
of an education in a more enlarged sense. We have 
heard it so insisted on, no such long while past, by 
members of the most learned institutions, at the same 
moment that they expressed more than a doubt of the 
prudence of enabling the common people to read, liter- 
ally to read, the Bible. But assuredly the good order 
of a populace left in the stupid general ignorance to 
which some of these good friends of theirs would have 
doomed them, cannot be preserved by any such feeble 
infusion of religious knowledge as these same good 
friends would instil into their mental grossness. As 
long as they are in this condition, there must be some 
far stronger power acting on them to preserve that 
good order. And if there actually has been such a 
power, hitherto competent to preserve it, with only such 
an impotent scantling of religious knowledge in the 
majority of the mass, and competent still to preserve 
it, a great deal of hypocritical canting might have been 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 18? 

spared, on the part of those whose chief or only argu- 
ment for teaching the people religion is the mainten- 
ance of that good order. 

But all this while we are forgetting to inquire how 
much is to be understood as included in that good 
order, that deference and subordination, which the 
possession of more mind and knowledge by the people 
might disturb or destroy. May not the notion of it, as 
entertained by some persons, be rather an image of the 
polity of an age long past, or of that which remains 
unaltered as if it were a part of eternal nature in the 
dominions of the East, than a model for the confor- 
mation of society here in the present times ? Is it 
required, that there should be a sentiment of obsequi- 
ousness in the people, affecting them in a manner like 
the instinct by which a lower order of animals is in 
awe of a higher, by which the common tribe of beasts 
would cower at the sight of lions ? Or, is the defer- 
ence expected to be paid, not on any understanding of 
reciprocal advantage, but absolutely and uncondition- 
ally, as to a claim founded in abstract or divine right ? 
Is it to be held a criminal presumption in the people, 
to think of examining their relations to the community 
any further than the obligation of being industrious in 
the employments to which it assigns them, and dutiful 
to its higher orders ? Are they to entertain no question 
respecting the right adjustment of their condition in 
the arrangements of the great social body ? Are they 
forbidden ever to admit a single doubt of its being 
quite a matter of course, that everything which could 
be done for the interests of their class, consistently 
with the welfare of the whole, is done; or, therefore, 
to pretend to any such right as that of examining, 
representing, complaining, remonstrating, or an ultimate 



188 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

recourse, perhaps, in a severe necessity, to stronger 
expedients ? 

A subordination founded in such principles, and 
required to such a degree, it is true enough that the 
communication of knowledge is not the way to perpet- 
uate. For the first use which men wiH infallibly 
make of an enlargement of their faculties and ideas, 
will be, to take a larger view of their interests ; and 
they may happen, as soon as they do so, to think they 
discover that it was quite time ; and the longer they do 
so, to retain still less and less of implicit faith that 
those interests will be done justice to, without their 
own vigilance and intervention. An educated people 
must be very slow indeed in the application of what 
they learn, if they do not soon grow out of all belief in 
the necessary wisdom and rectitude of any order of 
human creatures whatever. They will see how un- 
reasonable it were to expect, that any sort of men will 
fail in fidelity to the great natural principle, of making 
their own advantage the first object ; and therefore 
they will not be apt to listen, with the gravity which in 
other times and regions may have been shown in lis- 
tening, to injunctions of gratitude for the willingness 
evinced by the higher orders to take on them the 
trouble of watching and guarding the people's welfare, 
by keeping them in due submission. 

But neither will it necessarily be in the spirit of 
hostility, in the worst sense of the word, that a more 
instructed people will thus show a diminished credulity 
of reverence toward the predominant ranks in the 
social economy; and will keep in habitual exercise 
upon them a somewhat suspicious observation, and a 
judicial estimate ; with an honest freedom in sometimes 
avowing disapprobation, and strongly asserting any 
right which is believed to be endangered or withheld. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 189 

This will only be expressing that, since all classes 
naturally consult by preference their own interests, it 
is plainly unfit, that one portion of the community 
should be trusted with an unlimited discretion in order- 
ing what affects the welfare of the others ; and that, in 
all prudence, the people must refuse an entire affiance, 
and unconditional, unexamining acquiescence ; " except 
the gods, whose dwelling is not with flesh,'' would come 
to harmonize, and then administer, interests which are 
so placed unappeasably at strife ; — at strife ; for, what 
is so often asserted of those interests being in reality 
the same, is true only on that comprehensive theory 
which neither party is prompt to understand, or willing 
to make sacrifices of a more immediate self-interest to 
realize ; and it is evidently impossible for either, even 
if believing it true, to concede to the other the ex- 
clusive adjustment of the practical mode of identifi- 
cation. 

But only let the utmost that is possible be done, to 
train the people, from their early years, to a sound use 
of their reason, under a discipline for imparting a valu- 
able portion of knowledge, and assiduously inculcating 
the principles of social duty and of religion; and then 
something may be said, to good purpose, to their un- 
derstanding and conscience, while they are maintaining 
She competition of claims with their superiors. They 
*rill then be capable of seeing put in a fair balance, 
nany things which headlong ignorance would have 
•■aken all one way. They will be able to appreciate 
Many explanations, alleged causes of delay, statements 
<of difficulty between opposing reasons, which would 
be thrown away on an ignorant populace. And it 
would be an inducement to their making a real exertion 
of the understanding, that they thus found themselves 
so formally put upon their responsibility for its exer- 



190 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

cise ; that they were summoned to a rational discussion, 
instead 6f being addressed in the style of Pharaoh to 
the Israelites. The strife of interests would thus come 
to be carried on with less fierceness and malice, in the 
spirit and manner, on the part of the people. And the 
ground itself of the contention, the substance of the 
matters in contest, would be gradually diminished, by 
the concessions of the higher classes to the claims of 
the lower ; for there is no affecting to dissemble, that a 
great mental and moral improvement of the people 
would necessitate, though there were not a single 
movement of rude force in the case, important con- 
cessions to them, on the part of the superior orders. 
A people advanced to such a state, would make its 
moral power felt in a thousand ways, and every mo- 
ment. This general augmentation of sense and right 
principle would send forth, against all arrangements 
and inveterate or more modern usages, of the nature 
of invidious exclusion, arbitrary repression, and the 
debasement of great public interests into a detestable 
private traffic, an energy, which could no more be 
resisted than the power of the sun, when he advances 
in the spring to annihilate the relics and vestiges of 
the winter. This plastic influence would modify the 
institutions of the national community, to a state better 
adapted to secure all the popular rights ; and to con- 
vey the genuine, collective opinion, to bear directly on 
the counsel and transaction of national concerns. That 
opinion would be so unequivocally manifested, as to 
leave no pretence for a doubtful interpretation of its 
signs ; and with such authority as to preclude any 
question whether to set it at defiance. 

That such effects would be inseparable frOm a great 
general advancement of the people in knowledge and 
corrected character, must be freely acknowledged to ita 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 191 

disapproves. And is it because these would be the 
consequences, that they disapprove it ? Then let them 
say, what it is that they would expect from an opposite 
system. What is it, that they could seriously promise 
themselves, from the conservative virtue of all the ig- 
norance, that can henceforward be retained among the 
people of this part of the world ? It is true, the re- 
maining ignorance is so great that they cannot well 
overrate its general amount ; but how can they fail to 
perceive the importance of those particulars in which 
its dominion has been broken up ? There is indeed a 
hemisphere of "gross darkness over the people;" it 
may be possible to withhold from it long the illumina- 
tion of the sun ; but in the mean time it has been rent 
by portentous lights and flashes, which have excited a 
thought and agitation not to be stilled by the continu- 
ance of the gloom. There have come in on the popular 
mind some ideas, which the wisest of those who dread 
or hate their effect there, look around in vain for the 
means of expelling. And these glimpses of partial in- 
telligence, these lights of dubious and possibly de- 
structive direction amidst the night, will continue to 
prompt and lead that mind, with a hazard which can 
cease only with the opening upon it of the true daylight 
of knowledge. That knowledge should have been an- 
tecedent to the falling of these inflammatory ideas 
among the people ; and if they have come before the 
proper time, that is to say, before the people were pre- 
pared to judge rationally of their rights, and to appre- 
hend clearly the duties inseparable from them as a con- 
dition of their enjoyment, the calamitous consequences 
to the higher classes, as seen in the recent history of 
Europe, may be regarded as a righteous judgment of 
heaven upon them, for having suffered it to be possible 
for these new ideas of liberty and rights to come on the 



102 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

people in a state so unprepared. What were all their 
commanding authorities of government, their splendid 
ecclesiastical establishments, their great personal wealth 
and influence, — all their lofty powers and distinctions 
which even their basest sycophants, sacerdotal or poet- 
ical, told them, as one topic of adulation, that they were 
not entrusted with for their own sole gratification, — 
what were all these for, if the great body of the com- 
munities over which they presided were to be retained 
in a state in which they could not be touched by a few 
bold speculations in favor of popular rights, without 
exploding as with infernal fire ? How appropriate a 
retribution of Sovereign Justice, that those who were 
wickedly the cause should be the victims of the effect. 

Where such a consequence has not followed, but 
where, nevertheless, these notions of popular rights 
have come into the minds of the people very much in 
precedence and disproportion to the general cultivation 
of their intelligence and moral sense, it is most impor- 
tant that all diligence should be given to bring up these 
neglected improvements to stand in rank with those too 
forward speculations. 

Whether this shall be done or not, these notions and 
feelings are not things come into life without an instinct 
of what they have to do. The disapprovers of schemes 
for throwing the greatest practicable measure of sound 
corrective knowledge into the minds of the multitude, 
may take instruction or may decline it from seeing that, 
both in this country and other states of Europe, there 
has gone forth among the mass of the people a spirit of 
revolt from the obligation, which would retain their 
reverence to institutions on the strength simply of their 
being established or being ancient ; a spirit that reacts, 
with deep and settled antipathy, against some of the 
arrangements and claims of the order into which th» 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 193 

national community has been disposed by institutions 
and the course of events ; a spirit which regards some 
of the appointments and requirements of that order, as 
little better than adaptations of the system to the will 
and gratification of the more fortunate divisions of the 
species. And it has shown itself in a very different 
character from that of a mere pining despondency, or 
the impotent resentment excited sometimes in timidity 
itself by severe grievance, but quelled by alarm at its 
own rashness. The element and the temperament of 
its nature, and the force of its action, have been dis- 
played in the tremendous concussions attending its con- 
flict with the power arrayed in behalf of the old order 
of things to crush it. And is this spirit crushed ? Is 
it subdued ? Is it in the least degree reduced ? — re- 
duced, we mean, in its internal power, as a combination 
of the most absolute opinion with the impulse of some 
of the strongest passions. 

Is it, we repeat, repressed ? There may have been 
persons who could not, "good easy men," conceive a 
possibility of its surviving the fiery storm of the whole 
resources of the world converted into the materials of 
war, to be poured on it, and followed by the mightiest 
leagues and the most systematic legislation, all aimed 
at its destruction ; surviving to come forth with un- 
abated vigor at the opportune junctures in the future 
progress of events ; like some great serpent, coming out 
again to glare on the sight, with his appalling glance 
and length of volume, after a volley of missiles had sent 
him to his retreat. The old approved expedients against 
unreasonable discontents, and refractory tempers, and 
local movements of hostility excited by some worthless 
competitor for power, had been combined and applied on 
the grand scale ; and henceforward all was to be still. 
It was not given to these spell-bound understandings to 
17 



194 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

apprehend that the spirit to be repressed might be of a 
nature impassive to these expedients, possibly to be con- 
firmed by their application. Repressed ! What is it that 
is manifesting itself in the most remarkable events in the 
old, and what has been called the new world, at the present 
time ? And what are the measures of several of the great 
state authorities of Europe, whether adopted in delibe- 
rate policy, or in a fitful mood between rashness and dis- 
may ; what are, especially, the meetings, conferences, and 
military preparations, of the mightiest despots of the 
globe, assembled at this very hour against a small and 
unoffending nation,* — what are these but a confession 
or proclamation, that the spirit which the most enor- 
mous exertions had been made to overwhelm, has pre- 
served its life and energy ; like those warring immortal 
powers whom Milton describes as having mountains 
thrown on them in vain ? The progress of time renders 
it but more evident, that the principle in action is some- 
thing far different from a superficial transient irritation ; 
that it has gone the whole depth of the mind ; has pos- 
sessed itself of the very judgment and conscience of 
an innumerable legion, augmented by a continual and 
endless accession. No doubt is permitted to remain of 
the direction which has been taken by the current of 
the popular feeling, — to be recovered to its ancient ob- 
sequious course when some great river which has forced 
a new channel shall resume that which it has abandoned. 
For when once the great mass, of the lower and im- 
mensely larger division of the community, shall have 
become filled with an absolute, and almost unanimous 
conviction, that they, the grand physical agency of that 
community ; that they, the operators, the producers, the 

* The meeting of imperial and royal personages at Troppau 
and Laybach, for the detestable purpose of crushing the newly 
acquired liberty of the kingdom of Naples. — January, 1821. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 195 

preparers, of almost all it most essentially wants ; that 
they, the part, therefore, of the social assemblage so 
obviously the most essential to its existence, and on 
which all the rest must depend ; that they have their 
condition" in the great social arrangement so disposed as 
not to acknowledge this their importance, as not to 
secure an adequate reward of these their services ; — we 
say, when this shall have become the pervading intense 
conviction of the millions of Europe, we put it as a 
question to any rational thinker, whether and how this 
state of feeling can be reversed or neutralized, if the 
economy which has provoked it shall yield to no modi- 
fication. But it is no question, he will confess. Then 
will he pretend not to foresee any material change in 
an order of things obnoxious to so vast a combination 
of wills and agents ? This may indeed be seriously 
avowed by some, who are so walled up in old prejudice 
and presumption that they really have no look out ; who, 
because a thing has been long established, mistake its 
artificial substruction of crumbling materials for the 
natural rock ; and it will be pretended by others, who 
think the bravado of asserting the impossibility of the 
overthrow may be a good policy for deterring the at- 
tempt. There has not been one of the great alterations 
effected by the popular spirit within the last half-cen- 
tury, that was not preceded by professions of contempt- 
uous incredulity, on the part of the applauders of 
things as they were, toward those who calculated on 
the effects of that spirit. There were occasionally be- 
trayed, under these shows of confidence and contempt, 
some signs of horror at the undeniable excitement and 
progress of popular feeling ; but the scorn of all seri- 
ous and monitory predictions of its ultimate result was 
at all events to be kept up, — in whatever proportions a 
time-serving interest and an honest fatuity might share 



196 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

in dictating this elated and contemptuous style. Should 
the latter of these ingredients at present predominate 
in the temper which throws off the fume of this high 
style, it will not leave much faculty in the defiers of all 
revolution, for explaining what it is they have to trust 
to as security against such consequences as we should 
anticipate from the progress of disapprobation and aver- 
sion in the people ; unless indeed the security mainly 
relied on is just that plain, simple expedient — force, for 
all nations on earth — downright force. It is plainly 
this that is meant, when persons disinclined to speak 
out give us a circumlocution of delicate phrases, " the 
conservative energies of the public institutions," " the 
majesty of the law," perhaps, and others of similar 
cast ; — which fine phrases suggest to one's imagination 
the ornamented fashion of the handle and sheath of the 
scimitar, wnich is not the less keen, nor the less ready 
to be drawn, for all this finery that hides and garnishes 
so menacing a symbol of power. 

The economy of states shall not be modified in favor 
of the great body of those who constitute them. — And 
are, then, the higher and privileged portions of the 
national communities to have, henceforward, just this 
one grand object of their existence, this chief employ- 
ment for their knowledge, means, and power, namely, 
to keep down the lower orders of their fellow-citizens 
by stress of coercion ? Are they resolved and prepared 
for a rancorous, interminable hostility in prosecution 
of such a benign purpose ; with a continual exhaustion 
upon it of the resources which might be applied to 
diminish that wretchedness of the people, which is the 
grand inflamer of those principles that have caused an 
earthquake under the foundations of the old social sys- 
tems ? But, " interminable" is no proper epithet to 
be applied to such a course. This policy of a bare 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 197 

uncompromising rigor, exerted to keep the people just 
where they are, in preference to adjustments formed 
on a calculation of a material change, and adapted to 

prepare them for it how long could it be successful 

— not to ask what would be the value or the glory of 
that success ? With the light of recent history to aid 
the prognostication, by what superstitious mode of 
estimating the self-preserving, and self-avenging com- 
petence of any artificial form of social order, can we 
believe in its power to throw back the general opinions, 
determinations, and efforts, of the mass of mankind in 
endless recoil on themselves ? That must be a very 
firm structure, must be of gigantic mass or most excel- 
lent basis and conformation, against which the ocean 
shall unremittingly wear and foam in vain. And it 
does not appear what there can be of such impregnable 
consistence in any particular construction of the social 
economy which is, by the supposition, resolved to be 
maintained in sovereign immutability, in permanent 
frustration of the persevering, ever-growing aim and 
impulse of the great majority, pressing on to achieve 
important innovations in their favor; innovations in 
those systems of institution and usage, under which 
they will never cease to think they have had far less 
happiness, or means of happiness, than they ought to 
have had. We cannot see how this impulse can be so 
repelled or diverted that it shall not prevail at length, 
to the effect of either bearing down, or wearing away, 
a portion of the order of things which the ascendant 
classes in every part of Europe would have fondly 
wished to maintain in perpetuity, without one particle 
of surrender. 

But though they cannot preserve its entireness, the 
manner in which it shall yield to modification is in a 
great measure at their command. And here is the im 
17* 



198 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

portant point on which all these observations are meant 
to bear. If a movement has really begun in the general 
popular mind of the nations, and if the principle of it 
is growing and insuppressible, so that it must in one 
manner or another ultimately prevail, what will the state 
be of any national community where it shall be an un- 
enlightened, half-barbarous people that so prevails ? — 
a people no better informed, perhaps, than to believe 
that all the hardship and distress endured by themselves 
and their forefathers were wrongs, which they suffered 
from the higher orders ; than to ascribe to bad govern- 
ment, and the rapacity and selfishness of the rich, the 
very evils caused by inclement seasons ; and than to 
assume it as beyond question, that the whole accumu- 
lation of their resentments, brought out into action at 
last, is only justice demanding and inflicting a retribu- 
tion. 

In such an event, what would not the superior orders 
be glad to give and forego, in compromise with prin- 
ciples, tempers, and demands, which they will know 
they should never have had to encounter, to the end 
of time, if, instead of spending their vast advantages 
on merely their own state and indulgence, they had 
applied them in a mode of operation and influence tend- 
ing to improve, in every way, the situation and charac- 
ter of the people ? It is true, that such a wild triumph 
of overpowering violence would necessarily be short. 
A blind, turbulent monster of popular power never can 
for a long time maintain the domination of a political 
community. It would rage and riot itself out of breath 
and strength, succumb under some strong- coercion of 
its own creating, and lie subject and stupified, till its 
spirit should be recovered and incensed for new com- 
motion. But this impossibility of a very prolonged 
reign of confusion, would be little consolation for the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 199 

classes against whose privileged condition the first tre- 
mendous eruption should have driven. It would not 
much cheer a man who should see his abode carried 
away, and his fields and plantations devastated, to tell 
him that the agent of this ruin was only a transient 
mountain torrent. A short prevalence of the overturn- 
ing force would have sufficed for the subversion of the 
proudest, longest established state of privilege; and 
most improbable would it be, that those who lost it in 
the tumult, would find the new authority, of whatever 
shape or name it were, that would arise as that tumult 
subsided, either able or disposed to restore it. They 
might perhaps, (on a favorable supposition,) survive in 
personal safety, but in humiliated fortunes, to ruminate 
on their manner of occupying their former elevated 
situation, and of employing its ample means of power, 
a due share of which, exerted for the improvement of 
the general condition, both intellectual and civil, with 
an accompanying liberal yet gradual concession of priv- 
ileges to the people, would have prevented the catas- 
trophe. 

Let us urge, then, that a zealous endeavor to render 
it absolutely impossible that, in any change whatever, 
the destinies of a nation should fall under the power of 
an ignorant infuriated multitude, may take place of the 
presumption that there is no great change to be ever 
effected by the progressive and conscious importance 
of the people ; a presumption than which nothing can 
appear more like infatuation, when we look at the recent 
scenes and present temperament of the moral world. 
Lay hold on the myriads of juvenile spirits, before they 
have time to grow up through ignorance into a reckless 
hostility to social order ; train them to sense and good 
morals ; inculcate the principles of religion, simply and 
solemnly as religion, as a thing directly of divine die- 



200 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

tation, and not as if its authority were chiefly in virtue 
of human institutions ; let the higher orders generally 
make it evident to the multitude that they are desirous 
to raise them in value, and promote their happiness ; 
and then whatever the demands of the people as a body, 
thus improving in understanding and the sense of jus- 
tice, shall come to be, and whatever modification their 
preponderance may ultimately enforce on the great so- 
cial arrangements, it will be infallibly certain that there 
never can be a love of disorder, an insolent anarchy, a 
prevailing spirit of revenge and devastation. Such a 
conduct of the ascendant ranks would, in this nation at 
least, secure that, as long as the world lasts, there never 
would be any formidable commotion, or violent sudden 
changes. All those modifications of the national economy 
to which an improving people would aspire and would 
deserve to obtain, would be gradually accomplished, in 
a manner by which no party would be wronged, and all 
would be the happier.* 

* The considerations in the latter part of this section (so plainly 
on the surface of the subject that they would occur to any thought- 
ful and observant man) have been verified in part by the course 
of events in our country, since the time they were written. At 
that time the superior, and till then irresistibly and invariably 
predominant, portion of the community, felt themselves in per- 
fect security against any comprehensive and radical change with- 
in the ensuing twelve or fourteen years. There might indeed be 
«ne or two subordinate matters in the established national system 
in which they might deem it not unlikely that the advocates and 
laborers for innovation would be successful ; but such an amount 
of innovation did not come within the view of even a feverish 
dream. Any man who should have predicted, especially, the 
recent greatest achievement against the inveterate system,* 
would have been laughed at as an incorrigible visionary; so 
proudly confident were they that the structure would be kept 

* The Reform Bill. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 201 

compact and impregnable in all its essential parts, by the cement 
of ancient institution, national veneration, opulence, and the in- 
herence of actual power, possessed from generation to genera- 
tion. 

In the next place, they were obstinately resolute against all 
material concessions. "When at intervals the complaints, claims, 
and remonstrances of the people sought to be heard, they treated 
them as unreasonable, absurd, factious ; and asserted that none 
cf the good sense and right feeling of the nation went that way. 
They declared that the existing order of things was on the whole 
so superlatively excellent that, if there were, perhaps, any tri- 
fling defects, it were far better to let them alone than to presume 
to touch with an innovating hand the integrity of so noble a 
system, the admiration and envy of all the world. As it was, it 
had " worked well" for our happiness and glory ; and who could 
say, if a tampering of alteration were once suffered to begin, 
where it might end ? Order the people to be quiet; let their 
factious demands and seditious movements be promptly and 
firmly repressed by authority ; and they would sink into insignifi- 
cance and silence. To think of such a thing as condescending 
to conciliate by moderate concessions would be weakness, and 
might eventually bring a hazard which otherwise could have no 
existence. 

And now for the consequence : the popular spirit, thus set at 
naught in present account and in calculation for the future, was 
discouraged from active outward manifestation, by the invete- 
rate, perfectly organized, and, for the present, resistless domina- 
tion. But under the pressure of wide-spread and unabating griev- 
ance, which quickened and envenomed every sentiment previously 
entertained regarding the rights and wrongs of the people, it was 
gradually acquiring, throughout the country, a more determinate 
sense of being absolved from all submissive respect toward the 
ascendant party, a more entire conviction of its right to vindicate 
its claims in any manner that should become practicable, and a 
hostility, but the more deep and intense for its being kept under 
by despondency of present success, against those who were re- 
jecting and contemptuously defying those claims. It wanted, 
then, only some occurrence that should present a possibility and 
a hope of success to burst out in sudden ardor. It was thus in 
collective power and readiness for action, when several events 
of prodigious excitement came close together ; and then, like a 
stream in one of the Swiss valleys, clammed up by a mound of 



202 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

earth or ice fallen across, to a lake deepening without noise, till 
its vast weight breaks away the obstruction with a tremendous 
tumult, the popular will bore down the aristocratic embankment, 
consolidated through so many years or ages. The overpowered 
party found the consequence of their obstinate and entire resist- 
ance ; and had to reflect with unmixed mortification how much 
less than they had lost, and without mitigating by the loss the 
hostile feeling of those who had taken it from them, would have 
been received with gratitude if yielded in the way of gradual 
voluntary concession. Happily the change was not left to be 
accomplished by physical force, as all such changes must be in 
purely despotic states ; but the people fully believe that they 
chiefly owe the forced surrender to the alarm which their demon- 
strations excited lest they should bring the question ere long to 
that arbitrament. 

But in the last place, there is a deplorable circumstance, at- 
tending this sudden rising of the popular spirit into power, and 
which throws a strong light on the criminal infatuation of a State 
that suffers the commonalty of its citizens to remain grossly un- 
cultivated and uncivilized — perhaps even fancies it sees in that 
ignorance a main security for its own stability. The fact is, that 
the people have acquired their power and privileges, before they 
are (speaking as to many of them) qualified for a wise and use- 
ful exercise of them. A large proportion of those who are now 
brought into what may be called political existence have grown 
up so destitute of all means and habits for a right use of their 
minds, that their notions, wishes, expectations, and determina- 
tions, respecting public interests, will exemplify anything rather 
than a competent judgment. And the proportion so raised is 
but perhaps a minor part of the multitude in which the popular 
spirit is embodied and vehemently excited. Great numbers on 
a lower level, and having no formal political capacity to act in, 
are nevertheless pervaded by a spirit which will bring the rude 
impulse of mass and combination into the movement of the popu- 
lar will. 

If alarmed at such a view, will not they who have so long held 
Ihe sovereign control over the national economy feel the bitterest 
regret that it had not been given them to obviate the possible 
dangers of such a crisis and such a change, or rather to prevent 
such a crisis and a change so abrupt, by exertions in every way, 
and on the widest scale, to rescue the people from their igno- 
rance and barbarism, instead of trusting to it for an uncontested 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 203 

undisturbed continuance of their own domination? But they 
scorned the idea, if it ever occurred, that the many-headed, many- 
handed " monster," (so named in the dialect of some of them,) 
after lying prone, and inert, and submissive, from time imme- 
morial, should at last become instinct with spirit, and rise up 
roaring in defiance of their power 

It is now for them to consider whether, by maintaining a tern 
per and attitude of sullen, vindictive, pugnacious alienation from 
the people, they shall wilfully aggravate whatever injurious con- 
sequences may be threatened by so sudden a revolution ; or en- 
deavor to intercept them by giving their best assistance to every 
plan and expedient for rescuing the lower orders from the curse 
and calamity of ignorance and debasement. Other remedial 
measures, besides that of education, are imperiously demanded 
by the miserable and formidable condition of the populace, but 
no other, nor all others together, can avail without it. 



Since the date of the above note, the spirit and policy of the 
ascendant class have been just that which a philanthropist would 
have deprecated, and a cynic predicted. 

Their moral chagrin at the acquisition by the people of a new 
political rank, an event by which they, (the ascendant class,) had 
for a while appeared amazed and stunned, has soon recovered to 
a prodigious activity of device and exertion to nullify that right- 
ful acquisition. For this purpose have been brought into play, 
on the widest scale, that of the whole kingdom, all the means 
and resources of wealth, station, and power ; with the utmost 
recklessness of equity, honor, and even humanity ; deluding the 
ignorant, corrupting the venal, and intimidating and punishing 
the conscientious : insomuch that the nominally conceded right 
or privilege is practically reduced to an inconsiderable propor 
tion of its pre-estimated worth ; while aristocratic tyranny has 
rendered it to many of the most deserving to possess it no better 
than an inflicted grievance. One important measure for the im- 
provement of the condition of the lower orders has been effected, 
because the anti-popular party saw it advantageous also to their 
own interests. But for the general course of then policy, we have 
witnessed a systematic determination to frustrate measures framed 
in recognition of the rights and wants of the people. As to their 
education, it continues abandoned to the efforts and totally inade- 



204 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

quate means of private individuals and societies ; except a com- 
parative trifle from the State, not so much for the whole nation 
for the whole year as the cost of some useless, gaudy, barbaric 
pageant of one day. — It is evident the predominant portion of 
the higher classes trouble themselves very little about the mental 
condition of the populace. It is even understood that a chief 
obstacle in the way of any comprehensive legislation on the sub- 
ject is found or apprehended in the repugnance of those classes 
to any liberal scheme : any scheme that, aiming simply at the 
general good, should boldly set aside invidious restrictions and a 
jealous, parsimonious limitation ; a scheme that should not work 
in subjection to the mean self-interest of this party or that, but 
for the one grand purpose of raising millions from degradation 
into rational existence. 



SECTION V. 



The most serious form of the evil caused by a want 
of mental improvement, is that which is exposed to us 
in its consequences with respect to the most important 
concern of all, Religion. This has been briefly adverted 
to in a former part of these descriptive observations. 
But the subject seems to merit a more amplified illus- 
tration, and may be of sufficient interest to excuse 
some appearance of repetition. The special view in 
which we wish to place it, is that of the inaptitude of 
uncultivated minds for receiving religious instruction. 
— But first, a slight estimate may be attempted of the 
actual state of religious notions among our uneducated 
population. 

Some notion of such a concern, something different 
in their consciousness from the absolute negation of 
the idea, something that faintly responds to the terms 
which would be used by a person conversing with 
them, in the way of questioning them on the subject, 
may be presumed to exist in the minds of all who are 
advanced a considerable way into youth, or come to 
mature age, in a country where all are familiar with 
several of the principal terms of theology, and have 
the monitory spectacle of edifices for religious use, on 
spots appointed also for the interment of the dead. If 
18 



206 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

this sort of measured caution in the assumption seem 
bordering on the ridiculous, we would recommend those 
who would smile at it to make some little experiments. 
Let them insinuate themselves into the company of 
some of the innumerable rustics who have grown up 
destitute of everything worth calling education ; or of 
the equally ill-fated beings in the alleys, precincts, and 
lower employments of towns. With due management 
to avoid the abruptness and judicial formality, which 
would preclude a communicative disposition, they might 
take occasion to introduce remarks tending, without 
the express form of questions in the first instance, to 
draw out the thoughts of some of these persons respect- 
ing God, Jesus Christ, the human soul, the invisible 
world. And the answers would often put them to a 
stand to conceive, under what suspension of the laws 
of rational existence the utterers could have been pass- 
ing so many years in the world. These answers might 
dispel, as by a sudden shock, the easy and contented 
assurance, if so unknowing a notion had been enter- 
tained, that almost all the people must, in one way or 
another, have become decently apprized of a few first 
principles of religion ; that this could not have failed 
to be the case in what was expressly constituted a 
great Christian community, with an obligation upon it, 
that none of its members should be left destitute of the 
most essential requisite to their well-being. This agree- 
able assurance would vanish, like a dream interrupted, 
at the spectacle thus presented, of persons only not 
quite as devoid of those first principles, after living 
eighteen, thirty, forty, or twice forty years, under the 
superintendence of that community, as if they had 
been the aboriginal rovers of the American forests, or 
natives of unvisited coral-built spots in the ocean. 
If these examiners were to prosecute the investigation 






car POPULAR IGNORANCE. 207 

widely, and with an effect on their sentiments corres- 
pondent to the enlarging disclosure of facts, they ^ould 
find themselves fallen into a very altered estimate of 
this our Christian tract of the earth. A fancied sun- 
shine, spread over it before, would have faded away. 
From appearing to them, according to an accustomed 
notion, peculiarly auspicious, as if almost by some vir- 
tue of its climate, to the growth of religious intelli- 
gence in the minds of the people, it might come to be 
regarded as favorable to the development of all things 
rather than that. Plants and trees, the diversity of 
animal forms and powers, the human frame, the features 
enlarging or enlarged to manhood in the younger per- 
sons looked at by the supposed examiner while an- 
swering his questions, with their passions also, and 
prevailing dispositions, — see how all things can unfold 
themselves in our territory, and grow and enlarge to 
their completeness, — except the ideas of the human 
soul relating to the Almighty, and to the grand pur- 
pose of its own existence ! 

The supposed answers would in many instances be- 
tray, that any thought of God at all was of very rare 
occurrence, the idea having never become strongly as- 
sociated with anything beheld in the whole creation. 
We should think it probable, as we have said before, 
that with many, while in health, weeks or months often 
pass away without this idea being once so presented as 
to fix the mind in attention to it for one moment of 
time. If they could be set to any such task as that of 
retracing, at the end of the days or the weeks, the 
course of their thoughts, to recollect what particulars 
in the series had struck the most forcibly and stayed the 
longest, it may be suspected that this idea, thus impres- 
sively apprehended, would be as rare a recollection as 
that of havinar seen a spienciui meteor. iet during 



208 ON POPULAR IGKOKANCE. 

that space of time, their thoughts, such as they were, 
shall have run through thousands of changes ; and even 
the name of God may have been pronounced by them 
a multitude of times, in jocularity or imprecation. 
Thus there is a broad easy way to atheism through 
thoughtless ignorance, as well as a narrow and difficult, 
one through subtle speculation. 

But that idea of God which has, by some means, 
found its way into their understandings, to abide there 
so nearly in silence and oblivion, — what is it, when 
some direct call does really evoke it ? It is generally a 
gross approximation of the conception of the Infinite 
Being to the likeness of man. If what they have 
heard of his being a Spirit, has indeed some little effect 
in prevention of the total debasement of the idea, it 
prevents it rather by confusion than by magnificence. 
It may somewhat restrain and baffle the tendency of 
the imagination to a direct degrading definition ; but it 
does so by a dissolution of the idea as into an attenu- 
ated cloud. And ever and anon, this cloudy diffusion 
is again drawing in, and shaping itself toward an image, 
vast perhaps, and spectral, portentous across the firm- 
ament, but in some near analogy to the human mode 
of personality. 

The divine attribute which is apprehended by them 
with most of an impression of reality, is a certain vast- 
ness of power. But, through the grossness of their 
intellectual atmosphere, this appears to them in the 
character of something prodigiously huge, rather than 
sublimely glorious. — As considered in his quality of 
moral judicial Governor, God is regarded by some of 
them as more disposed, than there is any reasonable 
cause, to be displeased with what is done in this world. 
But the far greater number have no prevailing senti- 
ment that he takes any very vigilant account or con 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 209 

cern.* And even those who entertain the more un- 
gracious apprehension, have it not in sufficient force to 
make them, once in whole months, deliberately think 
it worth while to care what he may disapprove. 

The notions that should answer to the doctrine of a 
Providence, are a confusion of some crude idea of a 
divine superintendence, with stronger fancies and im- 
pressions of luck and chance ; a confusion of them not 
unaptly exemplified in a grave and well-meaning senti- 
ment heard from a man in a temporal condition to be 
envied by many of his neighbors, " Providence must 
take its chance." And these are still further, and 
most uncouthly, confounded by the admixture of the 
ancient heathen notion of fate, reduced from its philos- 

* Some have no very distinct impression the one way or the 
other. Not very long since, a friend of the writer, in one of the 
midland counties, fell into talk, on a Sunday, with a man who 
had been in some very plain violation of the consecrated character 
of the day. He seriously animadverted on this, adding, Don't 
you think God will be displeased at and punish such conduct ? or 
words to that effect. The man, after a moment's consideration, 
answered, with unaffected cool simplicity, exactly thus : " That's 
according as how a takes it." 

Numerous anecdotes of the same cast have been more recently 
heard ; and among them that of a conversation with a thought 
less man, of worthless character, not in the lowest condition in so- 
ciety, and then consciously near death. The religious visitor rep- 
resented to him the serious and alarming situation of a man on 
the point of going from a sinful life into the presence of God as 
a Judge. The man, with a sort of general acknowledgment that 
il was so, yet hoped that God would not be severe with him. 
But the visitor anxiously pressed upon him the consideration that 
God is a just Being, and judges by a holy law: to which at last 
the answer was, with little emotion, " Then God and I must fight 
it out as well as we can." The phrase, in his use of it, did not 
mean anything of the nature of a hostile contest, but simply the 
settling of an affair, which he thought might be done without 
any great danger or trouble. 

18* 



210 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ophy to its dregs. In many instances, however, this 
last obtains such a predominance, as to lessen the con- 
fusion, and withal to preclude, in a great measure, the 
sense of accountableness. In neither of these rude 
states of the understanding, (that which confounds 
Providence and chance, and that which sinks in dull 
acquiescence to something obscurely imagined like 
fate,) is there any serious admission, at least during 
the enjoyment of health, of the duty or advantage of 
prayer. 

The supposed examiner may endeavor to possess 
himself of the notions concerning the Redeemer of the 
world. They would be found, in numerous' instances, 
amounting literally to no more than, that Jesus Christ 
was a worthy kind of person, (the word has actually 
been " gentleman," in more than one instance that we 
have heard from unquestionable testimony,) who once, 
somewhere, (these national Christians had never in their 
lives, thought of inquiring when or where,) did a great 
deal of good, and was very ill used by bad people. 
The people now, they think, bad as they may be, would 
not do so in the like case. Some of these persons may 
occasionally have been at church ; and are just aware 
that his name often recurs in its services ; they never 
considered why; but they have a vague impression 
of its repetition having some kind of virtue, perhaps 
rather in the nature of a spell. — The names of the four 
evangelists are by some held literally and technically 
available for such a use. 

A few steps withdrawn from this thickest of the 
mental fog, there are many who are not entirety un- 
informed of something having been usually affirmed, 
by religious formularies and teachers, of Jesus Christ's 
being more than a man, and of his having done some 
thing of great importance toward preventing our being 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 211 

punished for our sins. This combination of a majestic 
superiority to the human nature, with a subsistence yet 
confessedly human, just passes their minds like a shape 
formed of a shadow, as one of the unaccountable things 
that may be as it is said, for what they know, but 
which they need not trouble themselves to think about. 
As to the great things said to be done by him, to save 
men from being punished, they see indeed no necessity 
for such an expedient, but if it is so, very right, and so 
much the better ; for between that circumstance in our 
favor, and God's being too good, after all that is said 
of his holiness and wrath, to be severe on such poor 
creatures, we must have a good chance of coming off 
safely at last. But multitudes of the miserably poor, 
however wicked, have a settled assurance of this coming 
off well at last, independently of anything effected for 
men by the Mediator : they shall be exempted, they 
believe, from any future suffering in consideration of 
their having suffered so much here. There is nothing, 
in the scanty creed of great numbers, more firmly held 
than this. 

It is true, they believe that the most atrociously 
wicked must go to a state of punishment after death. 
They consider murderers, especially, as under this doom. 
But the offences so adjudged, according to any settled 
estimate they have of the demerit of bad actions, are 
comprised in a very short catalogue. At least it is 
short if we could take it exclusively of the additions 
made to it by the resentments of individuals. For each 
one is apt to make his own particular addition to it, of 
some offence which he would never have accounted so 
heinous, but that it has happened to be committed against 
him. We can recollect the exultation of sincere faith, 
seen mingling with the anger, of an offended man, while 
predicting, as well as imprecating, this retribution of 



212 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

some injury he had suffered ; a real injury, indeed, yet 
of a kind which he would have held in small account 
had he only seen it done to another person. — As to the 
nature of that future punishment, the ideas of these 
neglected minds go scarcely at all beyond the images 
of corporal anguish, conveyed by the well-known met- 
aphors. They have no impressive idea of the pain of 
remorse, and scarcely the faintest conception of an in- 
felicity inflicted by the conscious loss of the Divine 
favor. 

It is most striking to observe hew almost wholly 
negative are their conceptions of that future happiness 
which must be something — but what? — as the necessary 
alternative of the evil they so easily assure themselves 
of escaping. The abstracted, contemplative, and ele- 
vated ideas of the celestial happiness arc far above 
their apprehension ; and indeed, though they were not, 
would be little attractive. And the more ordinary 
modes of representing it in religious discourse, (if they 
should ever have heard enough of such discourse to be 
acquainted with them,) are too uncongenial viih their 
notions of pleasure to have a welcome, or abiding place, 
in their imagination or affections. Thus the soul, as to 
this great subject, is vacant and cold. And here the 
reflection again returns, what an inexpressible poverty 
of the mind there is, when the people have no longer 
a mythology, and yet have not obtained in its place any 
knowledge of the true religion. The martial vagrants 
of Scandinavia glowed with the vivid anticipations oC 
Valhalla ; the savages of the western continent had thtv 
animating visions of the " land of souls ;" the modern 
Christian barbarians of England, who also expect t 
live after death, do not know what they mean by thei 
phrase of "going to heaven." 

Most of this class of persons think very little in an] 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 213 

way whatever of the invisible spiritual economy. And 
some of them would be pleased with a still more com- 
plete exemption from such thought. For there are 
among them those who are liable to be occasionally 
affected with certain ghostly recognitions of something 
out of the common world. But it is remarkable how 
little these may contribute to enforce the salutary im- 
pressions of religion. For instance, a man subject to 
the terror of apparitions shall not therefore be in the 
smallest degree the less profane, except just at the time 
that this terror is upon him. A number of persons, 
not one of whom durst walk, alone, at midnight, round 
a lonely church, encompassed with graves, to which has 
perhaps lately been added that of a notoriously wicked 
man, will nevertheless, on a fine Sunday morning, form 
a row of rude idlers, standing in the road to this very 
church, to vent their jokes on the persons going thither 
to attend the offices of religion, and on the performers 
of those offices. 

Such, as regarding religion, is the state out of which 
it is desired to redeem a multitude of the people of this 
land. Or rather, we should say, it is sought to save a 
multitude from being consigned to it. For consider, in 
the next place, (what we wished especially to point at, 
in this most important article in the enumeration of 
the evils of ignorance,) consider what a fatal inaptitude 
for receiving the truths of religion is created by the 
neglect of training minds to the exercise of their facul 
ties, and the possession of the elements of knowledge. 

How inevitably it must be so, from the nature of the 
case! — There is a sublime economy of invisible realities. 
There is the Supreme Existence, an infinite and eternal 
Spirit. There are spiritual existences, that have kindled 
into brightness and power, from nothing, at his creating 
will. There is an universal government, omnipotent, 



214 ON POPULAR I3NORANCE. 

ill-wise, and righteous, of that Supreme Being over 
the creation. There is the immense tribe of human 
spirits, in a most peculiar and alarming predicament, 
held under eternal obligation of conformity to a law- 
proceeding from the holiness of that Being, but per- 
verted to a state of disconformity to it, and opposition 
to him. Next, there is a signal anomaly of moral 
government, the constitution of a new state of relation 
between the Supreme Governor and this alienated race, 
through a Mediator, who makes an atonement for human 
iniquity, and stands representative before Almighty 
Justice, for those who in grateful accordance to the 
mysterious appointment consign themselves to this 
charge. There are the several doctrines declaratory of 
this new constitution through all its parts. There is the 
view of religion in its operative character, or the doc- 
trine of the application of its truths and precepts by a 
divine agency to transform the mind and rectify the 
life. And this solemn array of all the sublimest reality, 
and most important intelligence, is extending infinitely 
away beyond the sensible horizon of our present stat' 
to an invisible world, to which the spirits of men pro- 
ceed at death for judgment and retribution, and with 
the prospect of living forever. 

Look at this scene of faith, so distinct, and stretching 
to such remoteness, from the field of ordinary things ; 
of a subsistence which it is for intellect alone to appre- 
hend; presenting objects with which intellect alone can 
hold converse. Look at this scene ; and then consider, 
what manner of beings you are calling upon to enter 
into it by contemplation. Beings who have never 
learned to think at all. Beings who have hardly ever 
once, in their whole lives, made a real effort to direct 
and concentrate the action of their faculties on anything 
abstracted from the objects palpable to cue sensos.: 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 215 

whose entire attention has been engrossed, from their 
infancy, with the common business, the low amusements 
and gratifications, the idle tfllk, the local occurrences, 
which formed the whole compass of the occupation, 
and practically acknowledged interests, of their pro- 
genitors. Beings who have never been made in the 
least familiar with even the matters of fact, those espe- 
cially of the scripture history, by which religious truths 
have been expressed and illustrated in the substantial 
form of events, and personal characters. Beings who, 
in natural consequence of this unexercised and unfur- 
nished condition of their understandings, will combine 
the utmost aversion to any effort of purely intellectual 
labor, with the especial dislike which it is in the 
human disposition to feel toward this class of subjects. 
What kind of ideas should you imagine to be raised in 
their minds, by all the words you might employ, to place 
within their intellectual vision some portion of this 
spiritual order of things, — even should you be able, 
which you often would not, to engage any effort of 
attention to the subject ? — And yet we have heard this 
disqualification for receiving religious knowledge, in 
consequence of the want of early mental culture, made 
very light of by men whose pretensions to judgment 
had no less a foundation than an academical course and 
a consecrated profession. They would maintain, with 
every appearance of thinking so, that a very little, that 
the barest trifle, of regulated exercise of the mind in 
youth, would be enough for the common people as a 
preparation for gaining as much knowledge of religion 
as they could ever want ; that any such thing as a 
practice of reading, (a practice of hazardous tendency,) 
would be needless for the purpose, since they might 
gain a competence of that knowledge by attendance on 
the public ministration in the church. And there must 



216 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

have been a very recent acquiescence in a new fashion 
of opinion, if numbers of the same class of men would 
not, in honestly avowing their thoughts, say something 
not far different at this hour. 

But the pretended facility of gaining a competence 
of religious knowledge by such persons on such terms, 
can only mean, that the smallest conceivable portion of 
it may suffice. For we may appeal to those pious and 
benevolent persons who have made the most numerous 
trials, for testimony to the inaptitude of uneducated 
people to receive that kind of instruction. You have 
visited, perhaps, some numerous family, or Sunday 
assemblage of several related families ; to which you 
had access without awkward intrusion, in consequence 
of the acquaintance arising from near neighborhood, 
or of little services you had rendered, or of the cir- 
cumstance of any of their younger children coming to 
your charity schools. It was to you soon made sensible 
what a sterile, blighted spot of rational nature you were 
in, by indications unequivocal to your perception, 
though, it maybe, not easily reducible to exact descrip- 
tion. And those indications were perhaps almost 
equally apparent in the young persons, in those ad- 
vanced to the middle of life, and in those who were 
evidently destined not long to remain in it, the patriarch, 
perhaps, and the eldest matron, of the kindred company. 
You attempted by degrees, with all managements of 
art, as if you had been seeking to gain a favor for 
yourselves, to train into the talk some topic bearing 
toward religion ; and which could be followed up into 
a more explicit reference to that great subject, without 
the abruptness which causes instant silence and recoil. 
We will suppose that the gloom of such a moral scene 
was not augmented to you, by the mortification of ob- 
serving impatience of this suspension of their usual 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 217 

and favorite tenor of discourse, betrayed in marks 
of suppressed irritation, or rather by the withdrawing 
of one, and another, from the company. But it was 
quite enough to render the moments and feelings some 
of the most disconsolate you had ever experienced, to 
have thus immediately before you a number of rational 
beings as in a dark prison-house, and to feel the impo- 
tence of your friendly efforts to bring them out. Their 
darkness of ignorance infused into your spirit the dark- 
ness of melancholy, when you perceived that the fittest 
words you could think of, in every change and combi- 
nation in which you could dispose them, failed to impart 
to their understanding, in the meaning you wanted to 
convey, the most elementary and essential ideas of the 
most momentous subject. 

You thought again, perhaps, and again, Surely this 
mode of expression, or this, as it is in words not out of 
common usage, will define the thing to their apprehen- 
sion. But you were forced to perceive that the com- 
mon phraseology of the language, those words which 
make the substance of ordinary discourse on ordinary 
subjects, had not, for the understandings of these per- 
sons, a general applicableness. It seemed as if the 
mere elemental vehicle, (if we may so name it,) avail- 
able indifferently for conveying all sorts of sense, except 
science, had become in its meaning special and ex- 
clusive for their own sort of topics. Their narrow as- 
sociations had rendered it incapable of conveying sense 
to them on matters foreign to their habits. When used 
on a subject to which they were quite unaccustomed, 
it became like a stream which, though one and the same 
current, flows clear on the one side, and muddy (as we 
sometimes see for a space) on the other ; and to them 
it was clear only at their own edge. And if thus even 
the plain popular language turned dark on their under- 
19 



218 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

standings when employed in explanation of religion, it 
is easy to imagine what had been the success of a more 
peculiarly theological phraseology, though it were 
limited to such terms as are of frequent use in the Bible. 
You continued, however, the effort for a while. As 
desirous to show you due civility, some of the persons, 
perhaps the oldest, would give assent to what you said, 
with some sign of acknowledgment of the importance 
of the concern. The assent would perhaps be expressed 
in a form meant and believed to be equivalent to what 
you had said. And when it gave an intelligible idea, it 
might probably betray the grossest possible misconcep- 
tion of the first principles of Christianity. It might be 
a crude formation from the very same substance of 
which some of the worst errors of popery are consti- 
tuted ; and might strongly suggest to you, in a glance 
of thought, how easily popery might have become the 
religion of ignorance ; how naturally ignorance and 
corrupt feeling mixing with a slight vague notion of 
Christianity, would turn it into just such a thing as 
popery. You tried, perhaps, with repeated modifica- 
tions of your expression, and attempts at illustration, 
to loosen the false notion, and to place the true one con- 
trasted with it in such a near obviousness to the appre- 
hension, that at least the difference should be seen, and 
(perhaps you hoped) a little movement excited to think 
on the subject, and make a serious question of it. But 
all in vain. The hoary subject of your too late instruc- 
tion, (a spectacle reminding you painfully of the words 
which denominate the siafn of old asre " crown of 
glory,") either would still take it that it came all to the 
same thing, or, if compelled to perceive that you really 
were trying to make him unthink his poor old notions, 
and learn something new and contrary, would probably 
retreat, in a little while, into a half sullen, half despon 






ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 219 

dent silence, after observing, that lie was too old, " the 
worse was the luck," to be able to learn about such 
things, which he never had, like you, the "scholarship" 
and the time for. 

In several of the party you perceived the signs of al- 
most a total blank. They seemed but to be waiting for 
any trifling incident to take their attention, and keep 
their minds alive. Some one with a little more of 
listening curiosity, but without caring about the sub- 
ject, might have to observe, that it seemed to him the 
same kind of thing that the methodist parson, (the 
term most likely to be used if any very serious and 
earnest Christian instructor had appeared in the neigh- 
borhood,) was lately saying in such a one's funeral-ser- 
mon. It is too possible that one or two of the visages 
of the company, of the younger people especially, might 
wear, during a good part of the time, somewhat of a 
derisive smile, meaning, " What odd kind of stuff all 
this is ;" as if they could not help thinking it ludicrously 
strange that any one should be talking of God, of the 
Saviour of mankind, the facts of the Bible, the welfare 
of the soul, the shortness and value of life, and a future 
account, when he might be talking of the neighboring 
fair, past or expected, or the local quarrels, or the last 
laughable incident or adventure of the hamlet. It is 
particularly observable, that grossly ignorant persons 
are very apt to take a ludicrous impression from high 
and solemn subjects ; at least when introduced in any 
other time or way than in the ceremonial of public re- 
ligious service ; when brought forward as a personal 
concern, demanding consideration everywhere, and 
which may be urged by individual on individual. You 
have commonly enough seen this provoke the grin of 
stupidity and folly. And if you asked yourselves, 
(for it were in vain to ask them,) why it produced this 



2,20 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

so perverse effect, you had only to consider that, to 
minds abandoned through ignorance to be totally en- 
grossed by the immediate objects of sense, the grave 
assumption, and emphatic enforcement, of the trans- 
cendent importance of a wholly unseen and spiritual 
economy, has much the appearance and effect of a great 
lie attempted to be passed on them. You might in- 
deed recollect also, that the most which some of them 
are likely to have learnt about religion, is the circum- 
stance, that the persons professing to make it an earnest 
concern are actually regarded as fit objects of derision 
by multitudes, not of the vulgar order only, but in- 
cluding many of the wealthy, the genteel, the magiste- 
rial, and the dignified in point of rank. 

Individuals of the most ignorant class may stroll into 
a place of worship, bearing their character so conspicu- 
ously in their appearance and manner as to draw the 
particular notice of the preacher, while addressing the 
congregation. It may be, that having taken their stare 
round the place, they go out, just, it may happen, when 
he is in the midst of a marked, prominent, and even 
picturesque illustration, perhaps from some of the strik- 
ing facts or characters of the Scripture history, which 
had not made the slightest ingress on their thoughts or 
imagination. Or they are pleased to stay through the 
service ; during which his eye is frequently led to where 
several of them may be seated together. Without an 
appearance of addressing them personally, he shall be 
excited to direct a special effort toward what he sur- 
mises to be the state of their minds. He may in this 
effort acquire an additional force, emphasis, and point- 
edness of delivery ; but especially his utmost menM 
force shall be brought into action to strike upon tk&x 
faculties with vivid, rousing ideas, plainly and briefly 
expressed. And he fancies, perhaps, that he has at 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 221 

least arrested their attention ; that what is goino- from 
his mind is in some manner or other taking a place in 
theirs ; when some inexpressibly trivial occurring cir- 
cumstance shows him, that the hold he has on them is 
not of the strength of a spider's web. Those thoughts, 
those intellects, those souls, are instantly and wholly 
gone — from a representation of one of the awful visita- 
tions of divine judgment in the ancient world — a de- 
scription of sublime angelic agency, as in some recorded 
fact in the Bible — an illustration of the discourse, 
miracles, or expiatory sorrows of the Redeemer of the 
world — a strong appeal to conscience on past sin — a 
statement, perhaps in the form of example, of an im- 
portant duty in given circumstances — a cogent enforce- 
ment of some specific point as of most essential moment 
in respect to eternal safety ; — from the attempted 
grasp, or supposed seizure, of any such subject, these 
rational spirits started away, with infinite facility, to 
the movements occasioned by the falling of a hat from 
a peg. 

By the time that any semblance of attention returns, 
the preacher's address may have taken the form of 
pointed interrogation, with very defined supposed facts, 
or even real ones, to give the question and its principle 
as it were a tangible substance. Well; just at the 
moment when his questions converge to a point, which, 
was to have been a dart of conviction striking the 
understanding, and compelling the common sense and 
conscience of the auditors to answer for themselves, — 
at that moment, he perceives two or three of the 
persons he had particularly in view begin an active 
whispering^ prolonged with the accompaniment of the 
appropriate vulgar smiles. They may possibly relapse 
at leno-th, through sheer dulness, into tolerable decorum : 
and the instructor, not quite losing sight of them, tries 
19* 



222 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

yet again to impel some ' serious ideas through the 
obtuseness of their mental being. But he can clearly 
perceive, after the animal spirits have thus been a little 
quieted by the necessity of sitting still awhile, the 
signs of a stupid vacancy, which is hardly sensible 
that anything is actually saying, and probably makes, 
in the case of some of the individuals, what is mentally 
but a slight transition to yawning and sleep. 

Utter io-norance is a most effectual fortification to a 

o 

bad state of the mind. Prejudice may perhaps be 
removed ; unbelief may be reasoned with ; even demo- 
niacs have been compelled to bear witness to the truth ; 
but the stupidity of confirmed ignorance not only de- 
feats the ultimate efficacy of the means for making men 
wiser and better, but stands in preliminary defiance to 
the very act of their application. It reminds us of an 
account, in one of the relations of the French Egyptian 
campaigns, of the attempt to reduce a garrison posted 
in a bulky fort of mud. Had the defences been of 
timber, the besiegers might have set fire to and burned 
them ; had they been of stone, they might have shaken 
and ultimately breached them by the battery of their 
cannon ; or they might have undermined and blown 
them up. But the huge mound of mud had nothing 
susceptible of fire or any other force ; the missiles 
from the artillery were discharged but to be buried 
in the dull mass ; and all the means of demolition 
were baffled. 

The most melancholy of the exemplifications of the 
effect of ignorance, as constituting an incapacity for 
receiving religious instruction, have been presented to 
those who have visited persons thus devoid of knowl- 
edge in sickness and the approach to death. Supposing 
them to manifest alarm and solicitude, it is deplorable 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 223 

to see how powerless their understandings are, for any 
distinct conception of what, or why, it is that they fear, 
or regret, or desire. The objects of their apprehension 
come round them as vague forms of darkness, instead 
of distinctly exhibited dangers and foes, which they 
might steadily contemplate, and think how to escape or 
encounter. And how little does the benevolent in- 
structor find it possible for him to do, when he applies 
his mind to the painful task of reducing this gloomy 
confused vision to the plain defined truth of their un- 
happy situation, set in order before their eyes. 

He deems it necessary to speak of the most elemen- 
tary principles — the perfect holiness and justice of God 
— the corresponding holiness and the all- comprehending 
extent of his law, appointed to his creatures — the ab- 
solute duty of conformity to it in every act, word, and 
thought — the necessary condemnation consequent on 
failure — the dreadful evil, therefore, of sin, both in its 
principle and consequences. God — perfect holiness — 
justice — law — universal conformity- -sin — condemna- 
tion ! Alas ! the hapless auditor has no such sense of 
the force of terms, and no such analogical ideas, as to 
furnish the medium for conveying these representations 
to his understanding. He never had, at any time ; and 
now there may be in his mind all the additional con- 
fusion, and incapacity of fixed attention, arising from 
pain, debility, and sleeplessness. All this therefore 
passes before him with a tenebrious glimmer ; like 
lightning faintly penetrating to a man behind a thick 
black curtain. 

The instructor attempts a personal application, en- 
deavoring to give the disturbed conscience a rational 
direction, and a distinct cognizance. But he finds, as 
he might expect to find, that a conscience without 
knowledge has never taken but a very small portion of 



224: ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the man's habits of life under its jurisdiction; and thai 
it is a most hopeless thing to attempt to send it back 
reinforced, to reclaim and conquer, through all the past, 
the whole extent of its rightful but never assumed 
dominion. So feeble and confined in the function of 
judgment through which it must see and act, it is 
especially incapable of admitting the monitor's estimate 
of the measure of guilt involved in omission, and in an 
irreligious state of the mind, as an exceedingly grave 
addition to the account of criminal action. The man 
is totally and honestly unable to conceive of the sub- 
stantial guilt of anything of which he can ask, what 
injury it has done to anybody. This single point — 
whether positive harm has been done to any one — com- 
prehends the whole essence and sum of the conscious 
accountableness of very ignorant people. Material 
wrong, very material wrong, to their fellow mortals, 
they have a conscience that they should not do ; a con- 
science, however, which they would deem it hard to be 
obliged to maintain entire even to this confined extent ; 
and which therefore admits some compromise and gives 
some license, with respect especially to any kind of 
wrong which has the extenuation, as they deem it, of 
being commonly practised in their class ; and against 
which there is a sort of understanding that each one 
must take the best care he can of himself. At this 
confine, so undecidedly marked, of practical, tangible 
wrong, these very ignorant persons lose the sense of 
obligation, and feel absolved from any further jurisdic- 
tion. So coarse and narrow a conscience as to what 
they do, is not likely to be refined and extended into a 
cognizance of what Jthey are. As for a duty absolute 
in the nature of things, or as owing to themselves, ir 
respect to their own nature, or as imposed by the Al 
mighty — that their minds should he in a certain pre 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 225 

scribed state — there does really require a perfectly new 
manner of the action of intellect te enable them to ap- 
prehend its existence. And this habitual insensibility 
to any jurisdiction over their internal state, now meets, 
in its consequences, the supposed instructor. In con- 
sideration of the vast importance of this part of a 
rational creature's accountableness, and partly, too, from 
a desire to avoid the invidiousness of appearing as a 
judicial censor of the sick man's practical conduct, he 
insists in an especial manner on this subject of the state 
within, endeavoring to expose that dark world by the 
light of religion to the sick man's conscience. But to 
give in an hour the understanding which it requires the 
discipline of many years to render competent ! How 
vain the attempt ! The man's sense of guilt fixes almost 
exclusively on something that has been improper in his 
practical courses. He professes to acknowledge the 
evil of this ; and perhaps with a certain stress of ex- 
pression ; intended, by an apparent respondence to the 
serious emphasis which the monitor is laying on another 
part of the accountableness and guilt, to take him off 
from thus endeavoring, as it appears to the ignorant 
sufferer, to make him more of a sinner than there is 
any reason, so little can he conceive that it should much 
signify what his thoughts, tempers, affections, motives, 
and so forth, may have been. By continuing to press 
the subject, the instructor may find himself in danger 
of being regarded as having taken upon him the unkind 
office of inquisitor and accuser in his own name, and of 
his own will and authority. 

When inculcating the necessity of repentance, he 
will perceive the indistinctness of apprehension of the 
difference between the horror of sin merely from dread 
of impending consequences, and an antipathy to its 
essential nature. And even if this distinction, which 



226 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

admits of easy forms of exemplification, should thus 
be rendered in a degree intelligible, the man cannot 
make the application. The instructor observes, as one 
of the most striking results of a want of disciplined 
mental exercise, an utter inability for self-inspection. 
There is before his eyes, looking at him, but a stranger 
to himself, a man on whose mind no other mind, except 
One, can shed a light of self-manifestation, to save him 
from the most fatal mistakes. 

If the monitor would turn, (rather from an impulse 
to relieve the gloom of the scene, than from anything 
he sees of a hopeful approach toward a right appre- 
hension of the austerer truths of religion,) if he would 
turn his efforts, to the effect of directing on this dark 
spirit the benign rays of the Christian redemption, what 
is he to do for terms, — yes, for very terms ? Mediator, 
sacrifice, atonement, satisfaction, faith; even the ex- 
pression, believing in Christ; merit of the death of 
Christ, acquittal, acceptance, justification ; — he knows, 
or soon will find, that he is talking the language of an 
occult science. And he is forced down to such expedi- 
ents of grovelling paraphrase, and humiliating analogy, 
that he becomes conscious that his method of endeavor- 
ing to make a divine subject comprehensible, is to divest 
it of its dignity, and reduce it, in order that it may not 
confound, to the rank of things which have not majesty 
enough to impress with awe. And after this has been 
done, to the utmost of his ability, and to the unavoida- 
ble weariness of his suffering auditor, he is distressed 
to think of the proportion between the insignificance 
of any ideas which this man's mind now possesses of 
the economy of redemption, and the magnitude of the 
interest in which he stands dependent on it. A symp- 
tom or assurance which should impart to the sick man 
a confidence of his recovery, would appear to him a far 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 227 

greater good than all he can comprehend as offered 
to him from the Physician of the soul. Some crude 
sentiment, as that he '•' hopes Jesus Christ will stand 
his friend;" that it was very good of the Saviour to 
think of us ; that he wishes he knew what to do to get 
his help ; that Jesus Christ has done him good in other 
things, and he hopes he will now again at the last ;* 
— such expressions will afford little to alleviate the 
gloomy feelings, with which the serious visitor descends 
from the chamber in which, perhaps, he may hear, a 
few days after, that the man he conversed with lies a 
dead body. 

But such benevolent visitors have to tell of still more 
melancholy exemplifications of the effects of ignorance 
in the close of life. They have seen the neglect of 
early cultivation, and the subsequent estrangement from 
all knowledge and thinking, except about business and 
folly, result in such a stupefaction of mind, that irre- 
ligious and immoral persons, expecting no more than a 
few days of life, and not in a state of physical lethargy, 
were absolutely incapable of being alarmed at the near 
approach of death. They might not deny, nor in the 
infidel sense disbelieve, what was said to them of the 
awfulness of that event and its consequences ; but they 
had actually never thought enough of death to have 
any solemn associations with the idea. And their 
faculties were become so rigidly shrunk up, that they 
could not now admit them ; no, not while the porten- 
tous spectre was unveiling his visage to them, in near 

* Such an expression as this would hardly have occurred hut 
from recollection of fact, in the instance of an aged farmer, (the 
owner of the farm,) in his last illness. In the way of reassuring 
his somewhat doubtful hope that Christ would not fail him when 
now had recourse to, at his extreme need, he said, (to the writer,) 
<( Jesus Christ has sent me a deal of good crops." 



228 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

and still nearer approach ; not when the element of 
another world was beginning to penetrate through the 
rents of their mortal tabernacle. It appeared that lit- 
erally their thoughts could not go out from what they 
had been through life immersed in, to contemplate, 
with any realizing feeling, a grand change of being, ex- 
pected so soon to come on them. They could not go 
to the fearful brink to look off. It was a stupor of the 
soul not to be awaked but by the actual plunge into 
the realities of eternity. In such a case the instinctive 
repugnance to death might be visible and acknowledged. 
But the feeling was, If it must be so, there is no help 
for it ; and as to what may come after, we must take 
our chance. In this temper and manner, we recollect a 
sick man, of this untaught class, answering the inquiry 
how he felt himself, " Getting worse ; I suppose I shall 
make a die of it." And some pious neighbors, ear- 
nestly exhorting him to solemn concern and prepara- 
tion, could not make him understand, we repeat with 
emphasis, understand why there was occasion for any 
extraordinary disturbance of mind. Yet this man was 
not inferior to those around him in sense for the com- 
mon business of life. 

After a tedious length of suffering, and when death 
is plainly inevitable, it is not very uncommon for per- 
sons under this infatuation to express a wish for its 
arrival, simply as a deliverance from what they are en- 
during, without disturbing themselves with a thought 
of what may follow. " I know it will please God soon 
to release me," was the expression to his religious med- 
ical attendant, of such an ignorant and insensible mor- 
tal, within an hour of his death, which was evidently 
and directly brought on by his vices. And he uttered 
it without a word, or the smallest indicated emotion, of 
penitence or solicitude ; though he had passed his life 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 229 

in a neighborhood abounding with the public means of 
religious instruction and warning. 

When earnest, persisting, and seriously menacing 
admonitions, of pious visitors or friends, almost literally 
compel such unhappy persons to some precise recogni- 
tion of the subject, their answers will often be faith- 
fully representative, and a consistent completion, of their 
course through mental darkness, from childhood to the 
mortal hour. We recollect the instance of a wicked 
old man, who, within that very hour, replied to the 
urgent admonitions by which a religious neighbor felt 
it a painful duty to make a last effort to alarm him, 
* What ! do you believe that God can think of damn- 
ing me because I may have been as bad as other folk ? 
I am sure he will do no such thing : he is far too good 
for that." 

We cannot close this detailed illustration of so gloomy 
a subject, without again adverting to a phenomenon as 
admirable as, unhappily, it is rare ; and for which the 
observers who cannot endure mystery in religion, or 
religion itself, may go, if they choose, round the whole 
circle of their philosophy, and begin again, to find any 
adequate cause, other than the most immediate agency 
of the Almighty Spirit. Here and there an instance 
occurs, to the delight of the Christian philanthropist, of 
a person brought up in utter ignorance and barbarian 
rudeness, and so continuing till late in life ; and then 
at last, after such a length of time and habit has com- 
pleted its petrifying effect, suddenly seized upon by a 
mysterious power, and taken, with an alarming and 
irresistible force, out of the dark hold in which the 
spirit has lain imprisoned and torpid, into the sphere 
of thought and feeling. 

Occasion is taken this once more of adverting to such 
facts, not so much for the purpose of magnifying the 
20 



230 ON POPULAR IG-NORANCE. 

nature, as of simply exhibiting the effect, of an influence 
that can breathe with such power on the obtuse intel- 
lectual faculties ; which it appears, in the most signal 
of these instances, almost to create anew. It is ex- 
ceedingly striking to observe how the contracted, rigid 
soul seems to soften, and grow warm, and expand, and 
quiver with life. With the new energy infused, it 
painfully struggles to work itself into freedom, from 
the wretched contortion in which it has so long been 
fixed as by the impressed spell of some infernal magic. 
It is seen filled with a distressed and indignant emotion 
at its own ignorance ; actuated with a restless earnest- 
ness to be informed ; acquiring an unwonted pliancy of 
its faculties to thought ; attaining a perception, com- 
bined of intelligence and moral sensibility, to which 
numerous things are becoming discernible and affecting, 
that were as non-existent before. It is not in the very 
extreme strength of their import that we employ such 
terms of description ; the malice of irreligion may easily 
parody them into poetical excess ; but we have known 
instances in which the change, the intellectual change, 
has bean so conspicuous, within a brief space of time, 
that even an infidel observer must have forfeited all 
claim to be esteemed a man of sense, if he would not 
acknowledge, — This that you call divine grace, what- 
ever it may really be, is the strangest awakener of 
faculties after all. And to a devout man, it is a spec- 
tacle of most enchanting beauty, thus to see the im- 
mortal plant, which has been under a malignant blast 
while sixty or seventy years have passed over it, coming 
out at length in the bloom of life. 

We cannot hesitate to draw the inference, that if 
religion is so auspicious to the intellectual faculties, the 
cultivation and exercise of those faculties must be of 
great advantage to religion. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 231 

These observations on ignorance, considered as an 
incapacitation for receiving religions instruction, are 
pointed chiefly at that portion of the people, unhappily 
the largest, who are little disposed to attend to that 
kind of instruction. But we should notice its preju- 
dicial effect on those of them to whom religion has 
become a matter of serious and inquisitive concern. 
The preceding assertions of the efficacy of a strong 
religious interest to excite and enlarge the intellectual 
faculty will not be contradicted by observing, never- 
theless, that in a dark and crude state of that faculty 
those well-disposed persons, especially if of a warm 
temperament withal, are unfortunately liable to receive 
delusive impressions and absurd notions, blended with 
religious doctrine and sentiment. It would be no less 
than plain miracle or inspiration, a more entire and 
specific superseding of ordinary laws than that which 
we have just been denominating "an immediate agency 
of the Almighty Spirit," if a mind left uncultivated all 
up through the earlier age, and perhaps far on in life, 
should not come to its new employment on a most im- 
portant subject with a sadly defective capacity for judg- 
ment and discrimination. The situation reminds us of 
an old story of a tribe of Indians denominated " moon- 
eyed," who, not being able to look at things by the light 
of the sun, were reduced to look at them under the 
glimmering of the moon, by which light it is an in- 
evitable circumstance of human vision to receive the 
images of things in perverted and deceptive forms. 

Even in such an extremely rare, instance as that 
above described, an example of the superlative degree 
of the animating and invigorating influence of religion 
on the uncultivated faculties, there would be visible 
some of the unfortunate consequences of the inveterate 
rudeness ; a tendency, perhaps, to magnify some one 



232 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

thing beyond its proportionate importance to adopt 
hasty conclusions; to entertain some questionable or 
erroneous principle because it appears to solve a diffi- 
culty, or perhaps falls in with an old prepossession ; to 
make too much account of variable and transitory feel- 
ings ; or to carry zeal beyond the limits of discretion. 
In examples of a lower order of the correction or 
reversal of the effects of ignorance by the influence of 
religion, the remains will be still more palpable. So 
that, while it is an unquestionable and gratifying fact, 
that among the uneducated subjects of genuine religion 
many are remarkably improved in the power and ex- 
ercise of their reason ; and while we may assume that 
some share of this improvement reaches to all who are 
really under this most beneficent influence in the crea- 
tion,* it still is to be acknowledged of too many, who 
are in a measure, we may candidly believe, under the 
genuine efficacy of religion, that they have attained, 
through its influence, but so inferior a proportion of 
the improvement of intellect, that they can be well 
pleased with the great deal of absurdity of religious no- 
tions and language. But while we confess and regret 
that it is so, we should not overlook the causes and 
excuses that may be found for it, in unfortunate super- 
addition to their lack of education ; partly in the natural 
turn of the mind, partly in extraneous circumstances. 

* Really under this influence, we repeat, pointedly; for we 
"justly put all others out of the account. It is nothing (as against 
this asserted influence on the intelligent faculty) that great 
numbers who may contribute to swell a public bustle about re- 
ligion ; who may run together at the call of whim, imposture, or 
insanity, assuming that name ; who may acquire, instead of any 
other folly, a turn for talking, disputing, or ranting, about that 
subject : it is nothing, in short, that cny who are not in real, con- 
scientious seriousness the disciples of religion, can be shown to 
be no better for it, in point of improved understanding. 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 233 

Many whose attention is in honest earnestness drawn 
to religion, are endowed by nature with so scanty an 
allotment of the thinking power, strictly so denominated, 
that it would have required high cultivation to raise 
them to the level of moderate understanding. There 
are some who appear to have constitutionally an invin- 
cible tendency to an uncouth, fantastic mode of forming 
their notions. It is in the nature of others, that what- 
ever cultivation they might have received, it would still 
have been by their passions, rather than, in any due 
proportion, by their reason, that an important concern 
would have taken and retained hold of them. It may 
have happened to not a few, that circumstances unfa- 
vorable to the understanding were connected with the 
causes or occasions of their first effectual religious im- 
pressions. Some quaint cast in the exposition of the 
Christian faith, not essentially vitiating, but very much 
distorting and cramping it, or some peculiarity or nar- 
row-mindedness of the teachers, may have conveyed 
their effect, to enter, as it were, at the door at the same 
moment that it was opened by the force of a solemn 
conviction, and to be retained" and cherished ever after 
on the strength of this association. This may have 
tended to give an obliquity to the disciple's understand- 
ing, or to arrest and dwarf its growth ; to fix it in pre- 
judices instead of training it to judgments ; or to dispense 
with its exercise hy merging it in a kind of quietism ; 
so that the proper tendency of religion to excite intel- 
lectual activity was partly overruled and frustrated. It 
is most unfortunate that thus there may be, from things 
casually or constitutionally associated with a man's 
piety, an influence operating to disable his understand- 
ing ; as if there had been mixed with the incense of 
a devout service in the temple, a soporific ingredient 
20* 



234 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

which had the effect of closing the worshipper's eyes in 
slumber. 

Now suppose all these worthy persons, with so many- 
things of a special kind against them, to be also under 
the one great calamity of a neglected education, and is 
it any wonder that they can admit religious truths in 
shapes veiy strange and faintly enlightened ; that they 
have an uncertain and capricious test of what is genu- 
ine, and not much vigilance to challenge plausible sem- 
blances ; that they should be caught by some fanciful ex- 
hibition of a truth which would be of too intellectual a 
substance as presented in its pure simplicity ; and should 
be ready to receive with approbation not a little of what 
is a heavy disgrace to the name of religious doctrine and 
ministration? Where is the wonder that crudeness, 
incoherence, and inconsistency of notions, should not 
disappoint and offend minds that have not, ten times 
since they came into the world, been compelled to form 
two ideas with precision, and then compare them dis- 
criminately or combine them strictly, on any subject 
beyond the narrow scope of their ordinary pursuits ? 
Where is the wonder, if many such persons take noise 
and fustian for a glowing zeal and a lofty elevation ; if 
they mistake a wheedling cant for affectionate solicitude ; 
if they defer to pompous egotism and dogmatical asser- 
tion, when it is so convenient a foundation for all their 
other faith to believe their teacher is an oracle ? No 
marvel if they are delighted with whimsical conceits as 
strokes of discovery and surprise, and yet at the same 
time are pleased with common-place, and endless repe- 
tition, as an exemption from mental effort ; and if they 
are gratified by vulgarity of diction and illustration, as 
bringing religion to the level where they are at home ? 
Nay, if an artful pretender, or half-lunatic visionary, or 
some poor set of dupes of their own inflated self-im- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 235 

portance, should give out that they are come into the 
world for the manifestation, at last, of true Christianity, 
which the divine revelation has failed, till their advent, 
to explain to any of the numberless devout and saga- 
cious examiners of it, — what is there in the minds of 
the most ignorant class of persons desirous to secure 
the benefits of religion, that can be securely relied on 
to certify them, that they shall not forego the greatest 
blessing ever offered to them by setting at naught these 
pretensions ? 

It is grievous to think there should be an active ex- 
tensive currency of a language conveying crudities, ex- 
travagances, arrogant dictates of ignorance, pompous 
nothings, vulgarities, catches of idle fantasy, and im- 
pertinences of the speaker's vanity, as religious in- 
struction to assemblages of ignorant people. But then 
for the means of depreciating that currency, so as to 
drive it at last out of circulation ? The thing to be 
wished is, that it were possible to put some strong coer- 
cion on the minds (we deprecate all other restraint) of 
the teachers ; a compulsion to feel the necessity of in- 
formation, sound sense, disciplined thinking, the correct 
use of words, and an honest, careful purpose to make 
the people wiser. There are signs of amendment, cer- 
tainly ; but while the passion of human beings for noto- 
riety lasts, (which will be yet some time,) there will not 
fail to be men, in any number required, ready to ex- 
hibit in religion, in any manner in which the people are 
willing to be pleased with them. Let us, then, try the 
inverted order, and endeavor to secure that those who 
assemble to be taught, shall already have learnt so 
much, by other means, that no professed teacher shall 
feel at liberty to treat them as an unknowing herd. 
But by what other means, except the discipline of the 
best education possible to be given to them, and the 



236 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

subsequent voluntary self-improvement to "which it may 
be hoped that such an education would often lead ? 

.We cannot dismiss this topic, of the unhappy effect 
of extreme ignorance on persons religiously disposed, 
in rendering them both liable and inclined to receive 
their ideas of the highest subject in a disorderly, per- 
verted, and debased form, mixed largely with other 
men's folly and their own, without noticing with pleasure 
an additional testimony to the connection between gen- 
uine religion and intelligence. It arises from the fact, 
apparent to any discriminating observer, that as a gen- 
eral rule the most truly pious of the illiterate disciples 
of religion, those who have the most of its devotional 
feeling and its humility, do certainly manifest more of 
the operation of judgment in their religion than is 
evinced by those of less solemn and devout sentiment. 
The former will unquestionably be found, when on the 
same level as to the measure of natural faculty and the 
want of previous cultivation, to show more discernment, 
to be less captivated by noise and extravagance, and 
more intent on obtaining a clear comprehension of that 
faith, which they feel it is but a reasonable obligation 
that they should endeavor to understand, if they are to 
repose on it their most important hopes. 



SECTION VI. 



Thus it has been attempted, we fear with too much 
prolixity and repetition, to describe the evils attendant 
on a neglected state of the minds of the people. The 
representation does not comprehend all those even of 
magnitude and prominence ; but it displays that por- 
tion of them which is the most serious and calamitous, 
as being the effect which the people's ignorance has 
on their moral and religious interests. And we' think 
no one who has attentively surveyed the state and 
character of the lower orders of the community, in this 
country, will impute exaggeration to the picture. It 
is rather to be feared that the reality is of still darker 
shade ; and that a more strikingly gloomy exhibition 
might be formed, by such a process as the following : — 
That a certain number of the most observant of the 
philanthropic persons, who have had most intercourse 
with the classes in question, for the purposes of in- 
struction, charitable aid, or perhaps of furnishing em- 
ployment, should relate the most characteristic cir- 
cumstances and anecdotes within their own experience, 
illustrative of this mental and moral condition ; and 
that these should be arranged, without any comment, 
under the respective heads of the preceding sketch, or 
of a more comprehensive enumeration. Each of them 
might repeat, in so many words, the most notable 



238 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

things he has heard uttered as disclosing the notions 
entertained of the Deity, or any part of religion ; or 
those which have been formed of the ground and extent 
of duty and accountableness ; or the imaginations re- 
specting the termination of life, and a future retribution. 
They might relate the judgments they have heard pro- 
nounced on characters and particular modes of con- 
duct ; on important events in the world ; on anything, in 
short, which may afford a test of the quality and com- 
pass of uncultivated thought. Let the recital include 
both the expressions of individual conception, and those 
of the most current maxims and common-places ; and 
let them be the sayings of persons in health, and of 
those languishing and dying. Then let there be pro- 
duced a numerous assortment of characteristic samples 
of practical conduct ; conduct not simply proceeding, 
in a general way, from wrong disposition, but bearing 
the special marks of the cast and direction which that 
disposition takes through extreme ignorance : samples 
of action that is wrong because the actor cannot think 
right, or does not think at all. The assemblage of 
things thus recounted, when the actual circumstances 
were also added of the wretchedness corresponding and 
inseparable, would constitute such an exhibition of fact, 
as any description of those evils in general terms would 
incur the charge of rhetorical excesses in attempting to 
rival. We can well imagine that some of these persons, 
of large experience, may have accompanied us through 
the foregoing series of illustrations, with a feeling that 
they could have displayed the subject with a far more 
striking prominence. 

And now again the mortifying reflection comes on 
us, that all this is the description of too probably the 
major part of the people of our own nation. Of this 
nation, the theme of so many lofty strains of panegyric ; 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 239 

of this nation, stretching* forth its powers in ambitious 
enterprise, with infinite pride and cost, to all parts of 
the globe ; — just as if a family were seen eagerly intent 
on making some new appropriation, or going out to 
maintain some competition or feud with its neighbors, 
or mixing perhaps in the strife of athletic games, or 
drunken frays, at the very time that several of its mem- 
bers are lying dead in the house. So that the fame of 
the nation resounded, and its power made itself felt, in 
every clime, it was not worth a consideration that a vast 
proportion of its people were systematically consigned, 
through ignorance and the irreligion and depravity in- 
separable from it, to a wretchedness on which that 
fame was the bitterest satire. It is matter for never- 
ending amazement, that during one generation after 
another, the presiding wisdom in this chief of Chris- 
tian and Protestant States, should have thrown out 
the living strength of that state into almost every mode 
of agency under heaven, rather than that of promoting 
the state itself to the condition of a happy community 
of cultivated beings. What stupendous infatuation, 
what disastrous ascendency of the Power of Darkness, 
that this energy should have been sent forth to per- 
vade all parts of the world in quest of objects, to in- 
spirit and accomplish innumerable projects, political 
and military, and to lavish itself, even to exhaustion 
and fainting at its vital source, on every alien interest ; 
while here at home, so large a part of the social body 
was in a moral and intellectual sense dying and putre- 
fying over the land. And it was thus perishing for 
want of the vivifying principle of knowledge, which 
one-fifth part of this mighty amount of exertion would 
have been sufficient to diffuse into every corner and 
cottage in the island. Within its circuit, a countless 
multitude were seen passing away their mortal exist- 



240 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ence little better, in any view, than mere sentient 
shapes of matter, and by their depravity immeasurably 
worse ; and yet this hideous fact had not the weight 
of the very dust of the balance, in the deliberation 
whether a grand exertion of the national vigor and re- 
source could have any object so worthy, (with God for 
the Judge,) as some scheme of foreign aggrandizement, 
some interference in remote quarrels, an avengement 
by anticipation of wrongs pretended to be foreseen, or 
the obstinate prosecution of some fatal career, begun 
in the very levity of pride, by a decision in which some 
perverse individual or party in ascendency had the in- 
fluence to obtain a corrupt, deluded, or forced concur- 
rence. 

The national honor, perhaps, would be alleged, in a 
certain matter of punctilio, for the necessity of under- 
takings of incalculable consumption, by men who could 
see no national disgrace in the circumstance that 
several millions of the persons composing the nation 
could not read the ten commandments. Or the national 
safety has been pleaded to a similar purpose, with a 
rant or a gravity of patriotic phrases, upon the appear- 
ance of some slight threatening symptoms ; and the 
wise men so pleading, would have scouted as the very 
madness of fanaticism any dissuasion that should have 
advised, — " Do you, instead, apply your best efforts, 
and the nation's means, to raise the barbarous popula- 
tion from their ignorance and debasement, and you 
really may venture some little trust in Divine Provi- 
dence for the nation's safety meanwhile." 

If a contemplative and religious man, looking back 
through little more than a century, were enabled to 
take, with an adequate comprehension of intellect, the 
sum and value of so much of the astonishing course of 
the national exertions of this country, as the Supreme 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 241 

Judge has put to the criminal account of pride and 
ambition; and if he could then place in contrast to the 
transactions on which that mighty amount has been ex- 
pended, a sober estimate of what so much exerted vigor 
might have accomplished for the intellectual and moral 
exaltation of the people, it could not be without an emo- 
tion of horror that he would say, Who is to be account- 
able, who has been accountable, for this difference ? 
He would no longer wonder at any plagues and judg- 
ments which may have been inflicted on such a state. 
And he would solemnly adjure all those, especially, 
who profess in a peculiar manner to feel the power of 
the Christian Religion, to beware how they implicate 
themselves, by avowed or even implied approbation, 
in what must be a matter of fearful account before the 
highest tribunal. If some such persons, of great merit 
and influence, honored performers of valuable public 
services in certain departments, have habitually given, 
in a public capacity, this approbation, he would urge 
it on their consciences, in the evening of life, to con- 
sider whether, in the prospect of that tribunal, they 
have not one duty yet to perform, — to throw off from 
their minds the servility to party associations, to esti- 
mate as Christians, about to retire from the scene, the 
actual effects on this nation of a policy which might 
have been nearly the same if Christianity had been ex- 
tinct ; and then to record a solemn, recanting, final pro- 
test against a system to which they have concurred in 
the profane policy of degrading that religion itself into 
a party. 

Any reference made to such a prospect implies, that 
there is attributed to those who can feel its seriousness 
a state of mind perfectly unknown to the generality of 
what are called public men. For it is notorious that, 
to the mere working politician, there is nothing on earth 
21 



242 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

that sounds so idly or so ludicrously as a reference 
to a judgment elsewhere and hereafter, to which the 
policy and transactions of statesmen are to be carried. 
If the Divine jurisdiction would yield to contract its 
comprehension, and retire from all the ground over 
which a practical infidelity heedlessly disregards or de- 
liberately rejects it, how large a province it would leave 
free ! If it be assumed that the province of national 
affairs is so left free, on the pretence that they cannot 
be transacted in faithful conformity to the Christian 
standard, that plea is reserved to be tried in the great 
account, when the responsibility for them shall be 
charged. For assuredly there will be persons found, to 
be summoned forth as accountable for that conduct of 
states which we are contemplating. Such a moral 
agency could not throw off its responsibility into the 
air, to be dissipated and lost, like the black smoke of 
forges or volcanoes. This one grand thing (the im- 
provement of the people) left undone, w^hile a thousand 
arduous things have been done or strenuously endeav- 
ored, cannot be less than an awful charge someivhere. 
And where ? — but on all who have voluntarily concurred 
and co-operated in systems and schemes, which could 
deliberately put such a thing last ? Last ! nay, not 
even that ; for they have, till recently, as we have seen, 
thrown it almost wholly out of consideration. A long 
succession of men invested with ample power are gone 
to this audit. How many of those who come after 
them will choose to proceed on the same principles, 
and meet the same award ? 

We were supposing a thoughtful man to draw out to 
his view a parallel and contrast, exhibiting, on the one 
side, the series of objects on which, during several ages, 
an enormous exertion of the national energy has been 
directed ; and on the other, those improvements of the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 243 

people which might have been effected by so much of 
that exertion as he deems to have been worse than 
wasted. In this process, he might often be inclined to 
single out particular parts in the actual series, to be 
put in special contrast over against the possibilities on 
the opposite line. For example ; there may occur to 
his view some inconsiderable island, the haunt of fatal 
diseases, and rendered productive by means involving 
the most flagrant iniquity ; an iniquity which it avenges 
by opening a premature grave for many of his country- 
men, and by being a moral corrupter of the rest. Such 
an infested spot, nevertheless, may have been one of 
the most material objects of a widely destructive war, 
which has in effect sunk incalculable treasure in the 
sea, and in the sands, ditches, and fields of plague-in- 
fested shores ; with a dreadful sacrifice of blood, life, 
and all the best moral feelings and habits. Its posses- 
sion, perhaps, was the chief prize and triumph of all 
the grand exertion, the equivalent for all the cost, mis- 
ery, and crime. * 

Or there may occur to him the name of some for- 
tress, in a less remote region, where the Christian na- 
tions seem to have vied with one another which of them 
should deposit the greatest number of victims, securely 
kept in the charge of death, to rise and testify for them, 
at the last day, how much they have been governed by 
the peaceful spirit of their professed religion. He 
reads that his countrymen, conjoined with others, have 
battled round this fortress, wasting the vicinity, but 
richly manuring the soil with blood. They have co- 
operated in hurling upon the abodes of thousands of 
inhabitants within its walls, a thunder and lightning 
incomparably more destructive than those of nature ; 
and have put fire and earthquake under the fortifica- 
tions ; shouting, " to make the welkin ring," at sight of 



244 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the consequent ruin and chasm, which have opened an 
entrance for hostile rage, or compelled an immediate 
submission, if, indeed, it would then be accepted to dis- 
appoint that rage of its horrible consummation. They 
have taken the place, — and they have surrendered it. 
The next year perhaps they have taken it again ; to be 
again at last given up, on compulsion or in compromise, 
to the very same party to which it had belonged pre- 
viously to all this destructive commotion. The opera- 
tions in this local and very narrow portion of the grand 
affray of monarchies, he may calculate to have cost his 
country as much as the amount earned by the toils of 
half the life of all the inhabitants of one of its popu- 
lous towns ; setting aside from his view the more por- 
tentous part of the account, — the carnage, the crimes, 
and the devastation perpetrated on the foreign tract, 
the place of abode of people who had little interest in 
the contest, and no power to prevent it. And why 
was all this ? He may not be able to divest himself of 
the principles that should rule the judgment of a mor- 
alist and a Christian, in order to think like a statesman ; 
and therefore may find no better reason than that, when 
despots would quarrel, Britain must fancy itself called 
upon to take the occasion to prove itself a great power, 
by bearing a high hand amidst their rivalries ; or must 
seize the opportunity of revenging some trivial offence 
of one of them ; though this should be at the expense 
of having the scene at home chequered between chil- 
dren learning little more than how to curse, and oh 
persons dying without knowing how to put words to 
gether to pray. 

The question may have been, in one part of the 
world or another, which of two wicked individuals of 
the same family, competitors for sovereign authority, 
should be actually invested with it, they being equal in 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 245 

the qualifications and dispositions to make the worst 
use of it. And the decision of such a question was 
worthy that England should expend what remained of 
her depressed strength from previous exertions of it in 
some equally meritorious cause. 

Or the supposed reviewer of our national history may 
find, somewhere in his retrospect, that a certain brook 
or swamp in a wilderness, or a stripe of waste, or the 
settlement of boundaries in respect to some insignificant 
traffic, was difficult of adjustment between jealous, irri- 
tated, and mutually incursive neighbors ; and therefore, 
national honor and interest equally required that war 
should be lighted up by land and sea, through several 
quarters of the globe. Or a dissension may have 
arisen upon the matter of some petty tax on an article 
of commerce : an absolute will had been rashly signified 
on the claim ; pride had committed itself, and was 
peremptory for persisting ; and the resolution was to be 
prosecuted through a wide tempest of destruction, pro- 
tracted perhaps many years ; and only ending in the 
forced abandonment by the leading power concerned, 
of infinitely more than war had been made in the de- 
termination not to forego; and after an absolutely 
fathomless amount of every kind of cost, financial and 
moral, in this progress to final frustration. — But there 
would be no end of recounting facts of this order. 

Now the comparative estimator has to set against the 
extended rank of such enormities the forms of imagined 
good, which might, during the ages, of this retrospect, 
have been realized by an incomparably less exhausting 
series of exertion, an exertion, indeed, continually reno- 
vating its own resources. Imagined good, we said ; — 
alas ! the evil stands in long and awful display on the 
ground of history ; the hypothetical good presents it- 
self as a dream ; with this circumstance only of differ- 
21* 



246 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ence from a dream, that there is resting on the con- 
science of beings somewhere still existing, a fearful 
accountableness for its not having been a reality. 

For such an island, as we have supposed our com- 
parer to read of, he can look, in imagination, on a space 
of proportional extent in any part of his native country, 
taking a district as a detached section of a general na- 
tional picture. And he can figure to himself the result, 
resplendent upon this tract, of so much energy, there 
beneficently expended, as that island had cost : an en- 
ergy, we mean equivalent in measure, while put forth 
in the infinitely different mode of an exertion, by all ap- 
propriate means, to improve the reason, manners, morals, 
and with them the physical condition of the people. 
What a prevalence of intelligence, what a delightful 
civility of deportment, what repression of the more 
gross and obtrusive forms of vice, what domestic do- 
corum, attentive education of the children, appropri- 
ateness of manner, and readiness of apprehension in 
attendance on public offices of religion, sense and good 
order in assemblages for the assertion and exercise of 
civil and political rights ! All this he can imagine as 
the possible result. 

We were supposing his attention fixed a while on the 
recorded operations against some strongly fortified 
place, in a region marked through every part with the 
traces and memorials of the often-renewed conflicts of 
the Christian states. And we suppose him to make a 
collective estimate of all kinds of human ability exerted 
around and against that particular devoted place ; an 
estimate which divides this off as a portion of the 
whole immense quantity of exertion, expended by his 
country in all that region in the campaigns of a- war, or 
of a century's wars. He may then again endeavor, by 
a rule of equivalence, to conceive the same amount of 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 247 

exertion in quite another way ; to imagine human forces 
equal in quantity to all that putting forth of strength, 
physical, mental, and financial, for annoyance and de- 
struction, expended instead, in the operation of effecting 
the utmost improvement which they could effect, in the 
mental cultivation and the morals of the inhabitants of 
one large town in his own country. 

In figuring to himself the channels and instrumen- 
tality, through which this great stream of energy might 
have passed into this operation, on a detached spot of 
his country, he will soon have many specific means pre- 
sented to his view : schools of the most perfect appoint- 
ment, in every section and corner of the town ; a sys- 
tem of friendly but cogent dealing with all the people 
of inferior condition, relatively to the necessity of their 
practical accordance to the plans of education ;* an ex- 
ceedingly copious supply, for individual possession, of 
the best books of elementary knowledge ; accompanied, 
as we need not say, by the sacred volume ; a number 
of assortments of useful and pleasing books for circu- 
lation, established under strict order, and with appoint- 
ments of honorary and other rewards to those who gave 
evidence of having made the best use of them ; a num- 
ber of places of resort where various branches of the 
most generally useful and attainable knowledge and arts 
should be explained and applied, by every expedient 
of familiar, practical, and entertaining illustration, ad- 
mitting a degree of co-operation by those who at- 

P It is here confidently presumed, that any man who looks, in 
a right state of his senses, at the manner in which the children 
are still brought up, in many parts of the land, 'will hear with 
contempt any hypocritical protest against so much interference 
with the discretion, the liberty of parents ; — the discretion, the 
liberty, forsooth, of bringing up their children a nuisance on the 
face of the earth. 



248 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

tended to see and hear ; and an abundance of commo- 
dious places for religious instruction on the Sabbath, 
where there should be wise and zealous men to impart 
it. Our speculator has a right to suppose a high de- 
gree of these qualifications in his public teachers of re- 
ligion, when he is to imagine a parallel in this depart- 
ment to the skill and ardor displayed in the supposed 
military operations. He may add as subsidiary to such 
an apparatus, everything of magistracy and municipal 
regulation : a police, vigilant and peremptory against 
every cognizable neglect and transgression of good 
order ; a resolute breaking up of all haunts and rendez- 
vous of intemperance, dishonesty and other vice ; and 
the best devised and administered institutions for cor- 
recting and reclaiming those whom education had failed 
to preserve from such depravity ; and besides all this, 
there would be a great variety of undefinable and op- 
tional activity of benevolent and intelligent men of 
local influence. 

Under so auspicious a combination of discipline, he 
will not indeed fancy, in his transient vision, that he be- 
holds Athens revived, with its bright intelligence all 
converted to minister to morality, religion, and happi- 
ness ; but he will, in sober consistency, we think, with 
what is known of the relation of cause and effect, 
imagine a place far surpassing any actual town or city 
on earth. And let it be distinctly kept in view, that to 
reduce the ideal exhibition to reality, he is not dream- 
ing of means and resources out of all human reach, 
of preternatural powers, discovered gold-mines, grand 
feats of genius. He is just supposing to have been ex- 
pended, on the population of the town, a measure of 
exertion and means equal, (as far as agencies in so dif- 
ferent a form and direction can be brought to any rule 
of comparative estimate) to what has been expended 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 249 

by his country in investing, battering, undermining, 
burning, taking, and perhaps retaking, one particular 
foreign town, in one or several campaigns. 

If he should perchance be sarcastically questioned, 
how he can allow himself in so strange a conceit as that 
of supposing such a quantity of forces concentrated to 
act in one exclusive spot, while the rest of the country 
remained under the old course of things ; or in such an 
absurdity as that of fancying that any quantity of those 
forces could effectually raise one local section of the 
people eminently aloft, while continuing surrounded 
and unavoidably in constant intercourse with the gene- 
ral mass, remaining still sunk in degradation — he has 
to reply, that he is fancying no such thing. For while 
he is thus converting, in imagination, the military ex- 
ertions against one foreign town, into intellectual and 
moral operations on one town at home, why may he 
not, in similar imagination, make a whole country cor- 
respond to a whole country ? He may conceive the 
incalculable amount of exertion made by his country, 
in martial operations over all that wide foreign territory 
of which he has selected a particular spot, to have been, 
on the contrary, expended in the supposed beneficent 
process on the great scale of this whole nation. Then 
would the hypothetical improvement in the one par- 
ticular town, so far from being a strange insulated 
phenomenon, absurd to be conceived as existing in ex- 
ception and total contrast to the general state of the 
people, be but a specimen of that state. 

He may proceed along the series of such confronted 
spectacles as far as bitter mortification will let him. 
But he will soon be sick of this process of comparison. 
And how sick will he thenceforward be, to perpetual 
loathing, of the vain raptures with which an immortal 
and anti- Christian patriotism can review a long history 



250 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of what it will call national glory, acquired by national 
energy ambitiously consuming itself in a continual suc- 
cession and unlimited extent of extraneous operations, 
of that kind which has been the grand curse of the 
human race ever since the time of Cain ; while the one 
thing needful of national welfare, the very summum 
bonum of a state, has been regarded with contemptuous 
indifference. 

These observations are not made on an assumption, 
that England could in all cases have kept clear of im- 
plication in foreign interests, and remote and sanguinary 
contests. But they are made on the assumption of what 
is admitted and deplored by every thoughtful religious 
man, whose understanding and moral sense are not 
wretchedly prostrated in homage to a prevailing system, 
and chained down by a superstition that dares not 
question the wisdom and probity of high national au- 
thorities and counsels. What is so admitted and deplored 
by the true and Christian patriots is, that this nation 
has gone to an awfully criminal extent beyond the line 
of necessity ; that it has been extremely prompt to find 
or make occasions for appearing again, and still again, 
in array for the old work of waste and death ; and that 
the advantage possessed by the preponderating classes 
in this protestant country, for being instructed (if they 
had cared for such instruction) to look at these trans- 
actions in the light of religion, has reflected a peculiar 
aggravation on the guilt of a policy persevered in from 
age to age, in disregard of the laws of Christianity, and 
the warning of accountableness to the Sovereign Judge. 

These observations assume, also, that there cannot 
be such a thing as a nation so doomed to a necessity 
and duty of expending its vigor and means in foreign 
enterprise, as to be habitually absolved from the duty 
of raising its people from brutish ignorance. This con- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 251 

cern is a duty at all events and to an- entire certainty ; 
is a duty imperative and absolute ; and any pretended 
necessity for such a direction of the national exertion 
as would be, through a long succession of time, incom- 
patible with a paramount attention to this, would be a 
virtual denial of the superintendence of Providence. It 
would be the same thing as to assert of an individual, 
that his duties of other kinds are so many and great, as 
to render it impossible for him to give a competent 
attention to his highest interests, and that therefore he 
stands exempted from the obligations of religion. 

Such as we have described has been, for ages, the 
degraded state of the multitude. And such has been 
the indifference to it, manifested by the superior, the 
refined, the ascendant portion of the community ; who, 
generally speaking, could see these sharers with them 
of the dishonored human nature, in endless numbers 
around them, in the city and, the field, without its ever 
flashing on conscience that on them was lying a solemn 
responsibility, destined to press one day with all its 
weight, for that ill arrangement of the social order 
which abandoned these beings to an exclusion from the 
sphere of rational existence. It never occurred to 
many of them as a question of the smallest moment, in 
what manner the mind might be living in all these 
bodies, if cnly it were there in competence to make 
them efficient as machines and implements. Contented 
to be gazed at, to be envied, or to be regarded as too 
high even for envy, and to have the rough business of 
the world performed by these inhalers of the vital air, 
they perhaps thought, if they reflected at all on the 
subject, that the best and most privileged state of such 
creatures was to be in the least possible degree morally 
accountable : and that therefore it would be but doing 



252 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

them an injury to enlarge their knowledge. And might 
not the thought be suggested at some moment, (see how 
many things may be envied in their turns !) how happy 
they should be, if, with the vast superiority of their 
advantages, they could still be just as little accountable ? 
But if even in this way, of envy, they received an un- 
welcome admonition of their own high responsibility, 
not even then was it suggested to them, that they should 
ever be arraigned on a charge to which they would 
vainly wish to be permitted to plead, " Were we our 
brothers' keepers?" And if an office designated in 
those terms had been named to them, as a part of their 
duty, by some unearthly voice of imperious accent, 
their thoughts might have traversed hither and thither, 
in various conjectures and protracted perplexity, before 
the objects of that office had been presented explicitly 
to their apprehension as no other than the reason, prin- 
ciples, consciences, and the whole moral condition of 
the vulgar mass. They would imderstand that its 
condition was, in some way or other, a concern lying at 
their door, but probably not in this. — We speak gener- 
ally, and not universally. 

But we would believe there are signs of a revolution 
beginning ; a more important one, by its higher princi- 
ple and its expansive impulse toward a wide and remote 
beneficence, than the ordinary events of that name. 
What have commonly been the matter and circumstance 
of revolutions ? The last deciding blow in a deadly 
competition of equally selfish parties ; actions and re- 
actions of ambition and revenge ; the fiat of a con- 
queror ; a burst of blind fury, suddenly sweeping away 
an old order of things, but overwhelming to all attempts 
to substitute a better institution ; plots, massacres, bat- 
tles, dethronements, restorations ; all actuated by a fer- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 25^ 

mentation of the ordinary or the basest elements of 
humanity. How little of the sublime of moral agency 
has there been, with one or two partial exceptions, in 
these mighty commotions ; how little wisdom or virtue, 
or reference to the Supreme Patron of national interests; 
how little nobleness or even distinctness of purpose, or 
consolidated advantage of success ! But here is, as we 
trust, the approach of a revolution with different phe- 
nomena. It displays the nature of its principle and its 
ambition in a conviction, far more serious and extensive 
than heretofore, of the necessity of education to the 
mass of the population, with earnest discussions of its 
scope and methods by both speculative and practical 
men ; in schemes, more speedily animated into operation 
than good designs were wont to be, for spreading use- 
ful knowledge over tracts of the dead waste where there 
was none ; in exciting tens of thousands of young per- 
sons to a benevolent and patient activity in the instruc- 
tion of the children of the poor ; in an extended and 
extending system of means and exertions for the uni- 
versal diffusion of the sacred scriptures ; in multiplying 
endeavors, in all regular and all uncanonical ways, to 
render it next to impossible for the people to avoid 
hearing some sounds at least of the voice of religion ; in 
the formation of useful local institutions too various to 
come under one denomination ; in enterprises to attempt 
an opening of the vast prison-houses of human spirits 
in dark distant regions ; in bringing to the test of prin- 
ciples many notions and practices which have stood on 
the authority of prejudice, custom, and prescription: 
and all this taking advantage of the new and powerful 
spirit which has come on the world to drive its affairs 
into commotion and acceleration; as bold adventurers 
have sometimes availed themselves of a formidable tor- 
rent to be conveyed whither the stream in its ordinary 
22 



254 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

state would never have carried them ; or as we have 
heard of heroic assailants seizing the moment of a 
tempest to break through the enemy's lines. — Such are 
some of the insignia by which it stands distinguished 
out and far off from the rank of ordinary revolutions. 

We are not unaware that, with certain speculators 
on this same subject of meliorating the state and char- 
acter of the people, some of the things here specified 
will be of small account, either as signs of a great 
change, or as means of promoting it. The widely 
spreading activity of a humble class of laborers, who 
seek no fame for their toils and sacrifices, is but a 
creeping process, almost invisible in the survey. The 
multiplied, voluntary, and extraordinary efforts to dif- 
fuse some religious knowledge and sentiment among 
the vulgar, appear to them, if not even of doubtful ten- 
dency, at least of such impotence for corrective opera- 
tion, that any confidence founded on them is simple 
fanaticism ; that the calculation is, to use a commercial 
term, mere moonshine. We remember when a publica- 
tion of great note and influence flung contempt on the 
sanguine expectations entertained from the rapid cir- 
culation of Bibles among the inferior population. At 
the hopeful mention of expedients of the religious kind 
especially, the class of speculators in question might 
perhaps be reminded of Glendower's grave and be- 
lieving talk of calling up spirits to perform his will ; or 
(should they ever have happened to read the Bible) 
of the people who seized, in honest credulous delight, 
the mockery of a proposal of pulling a city, to the last 
stone, into the river with ropes, as a prime stroke of 
generalship. 

When we see such expedients rated so low in the 
process for raising the populace from their degradation, 
we ask what means these speculators themselves would 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 255 

reckon on for the purpose. And it would appear that 
their scheme would calculate mainly on some supposed 
dispositions of a political and economical nature. Let 
the people be put in possession of all their rights as 
citizens, and thus advanced in the scale of society. Let 
all invidious distinctions which are artificial, arbitrary, 
and not inevitable, be abolished ; together with all laws 
and regulations injuriously affecting their temporal well- 
being. Give them thus a sense of being something in 
the great social order, a direct palpable interest in the 
honor and prosperity of the community. There will 
then be a dignified sense of independence ; the gener- 
ous, liberalizing, ennobling sentiments of freedom ; the 
self-respect and conscious responsibility of men in the 
full exercise of their rights ; the manly disdain of what 
is base ; the innate perception of what is worthy and 
honorable, developing itself spontaneously on the re- 
moval of the ungenial circumstances in the constitution 
of society, which have been as a long winter on the 
intellectual and moral nature of its inferior portions. 
All this will conduce to the practicability and efficacy 
of education. It will be an education to fit them for 
an education to be introduced with the progress of that 
fitness ; intellectual culture finding a felicitous adapta- 
tion of the soil. We may then adopt with some con- 
fidence a public system, or stimulate and assist all inde- 
pendent local exertions for the instruction of the people 
in the rudiments of literature and general knowledge ; 
and religion too, if you will. 

But, to say nothing of the vain fancies of the virtues 
ready to disclose themselves in a corrupt mass, under 
the auspices of improved political institutions, it is un- 
fortunate for any such speculation that what it insists 
on as the primary condition cannot as yet, but very im- 
perfectly, be had. The higher and commanding por- 



256 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

tion of the community have, very naturally, the utmost 
aversion to concede to the people what are claimed as 
theoretically their rights. They have, indeed, latterly 
been constrained to make considerable concessions in 
name and semblance. But their great and various 
power will be strenuously exerted, for probably a long 
while yet, to render the acquisitions made by the people 
as nearly as possible profitless in their hands. And 
unhappily these predominant classes have to allege the 
mental and moral rudeness of the lower, in vindication 
of this determined policy of repression and frustration ; 
thus turning the consequences of their own criminal 
neglect into a defence of their injustice. They will 
say, If the subordinate millions had grown up into a 
rational existence ; if they had been rendered capable 
of thinking, judging, distinguishing, if they were in 
possession of a moderate share of useful information, 
and withal a strong sense of duty ; then might this and 
the other privilege, or call it right, in the social consti- 
tution be yielded to them. But as long as they con- 
tinue in their present mental grossness they are unfit 
for the possession, because unqualified for the exercise, 
of any such privileges as would take them from under 
our authoritative control. 

Since they can and will, for the present, maintain 
this controlling power, to the extent of nearly invali- 
dating any political advancement attained, or likely to 
be soon attained, by the lower grades, a speculation that 
should place on that advancement, as a pre-requisite, 
our hope of a great change in the mental condition of 
the people, would be, to adopt a humble figure, setting 
us to climb to an upper platform without a ladder, or 
rather telling us not to climb at all. And while this 
supposed pre-requisite will be refused, on the allegation 
that the uncultivated condition of the people renders 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 25*7 

them unfit for a liberal political arrangement, the parties 
so refusing will be little desirous to have the obstacle 
removed ; foreseeing, as the inevitable consequence of 
a highly improved cultivation, a more resolute demand 
of the advantages withheld, a constantly augmenting 
force of popular opinion, and therefore a diminution 
of their own predominant power. They will deem it 
much more commodious for themselves, that the people 
should not be so enlightened and raised as to come into 
any such competition. And since they, with these dis- 
positions, have the preponderance in what we denomi- 
nate the State, we fear we are not to look with much 
hope to the State for a liberal and effective system of 
national education. 

What then is to be done ? — We earnestly wish it 
might please the Sovereign Ruler to do one more new 
thing in the earth, compelling the dominant powers in 
the nations to an order of institutions and administra- 
tions that would apply the energy of the state to so 
noble a purpose. Nor can we imagine any test of their 
merits so fair as the question whether, and in what 
degree, they do this ; nor any test by which they may 
more naturally decline to have those merits tried. But 
since, to the shame of our nature, there is no use to 
which we are so prone to turn our condemnation of 
evil in one form, as that of purchasing a license for it 
in another, the persons who are justly arraigning the 
powers at the head of nations should be warned that 
they do not take from the guilty omissions of states a 
sanction for individuals to do nothing. Let them not 
suffer an imposition on their minds in the notion en- 
tertained of a state, as a thing to be no otherwise 
accounted of than in a collective capacity, acting by a 
government ; as if the collective power and agency of a 
22* 



258 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

nation became, in being exerted through that political 
organ, an affair altogether foreign to the will, the ac- 
tion, the dut} T , the responsibility, of the persons of whom 
the nation is composed. Let them not put Out of sight 
that whetever is the duty of the national body in that 
collective capacity, acting through its government, is 
such only because it is the duty of the individuals com- 
posing that body, as far as it is in the power of each ; 
and that it would be their duty individually not the 
less, though the government, as the depositary of the 
national power, neglect it. But more than this; to 
speak generally, and with certain degrees of possible 
exception, we may affirm that a government cannot be 
lastingly neglectful of a great duty but because the 
individuals constituting the community are so. An 
assertion, that a government has been utterly and 
criminally neglectful of the moral condition of the 
inferior population, age after age, and through every 
change of its administrators ; but that, nevertheless, 
the generality of the individuals of intelligence, wealth, 
and influence, have all the while been of a quite oppo- 
site spirit, zealously intent on remedying the flagrant 
evil, would be instantly rejected as a contradiction. 
Such an enlightened and philanthropic spirit prevailing 
widely among the individuals of the nation would carry 
its impulse into the government in one manner or 
another. It would either constrain the administrators 
of the state to act in conformity, or ultimately displace 
them in favor of better men. Even if, short of such a 
general activity of the respectable and locally influen- 
tial members of society, a large proportion of them had 
vigorous!} 7 prosecuted such a purpose, it would have 
compelled the administrators of the state to consider, 
even for their own sake, whether they should be content 
to see so important a process going on independently 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 259 

of tb em, and in contrast with their own disgraceful 
neglect. 

But at the worst, and on the supposition that they 
were obstinately inaccessible to all moral and philan- 
thropic considerations, still a grand improvement would 
have been accomplished, if many thousands of the re- 
sponsible members of the community had attempted it 
with zealous and persevering exertion. The neglect, 
therefore, of the improvement of the people, so glaring 
in the review of our conduct as a nation, has been, to 
a very great extent, the insensibility of individuals to 
obligations lying on them as such, independently of the 
institutions and administration of the state. 

And are individuals now absolved from all such re- 
sponsibility ; and the more so, that the conviction of 
the importance of the object is come upon them with 
-such a new and cogent force ? When they say, re- 
proachfully, that the nation, as a body politic, concen- 
trating its powers in its government, disowns or neglects 
a most important duty, is it to be understood that this 
accusatory testimony is their share, or something equiv- 
alent in substitution for their share, of that very duty ? 
Does a collective duty of such very solid substance, 
vanish into nothing under any attempted process of re- 
solving it into fractions and portions for individuals ? 
And do they themselves, as some of the individuals to 
whom this duty might thus be distributively assigned, — 
do they themselves, in spite of self-love, self-estimation, 
and all the sentiments which they will at other times 
indulge in homage of their own importance, — do they, 
when this assignment is attempted to be made to them, 
instantly and willingly surrender to a feeling of crumb- 
ling down from this proud individuality into an undis- 
tinguishable existence in the mass ; and, profaning the 
language of religion, say to the State, " In thee we 



260 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

live, move, and have a being ?" Or, will they, (in as- 
similation to eastern pagans, who hold that a divinity 
so pervades them as to be their wills and do their ac- 
tions, leaving the mere human vehicle without power, 
duty, or accountableness,) will they account themselves 
but as passive matter, moved or fixed, and in all things 
necessitated, by a sovereign mythological something 
denominated the state ? 

Xo, not in all things. It is not so that they feel with 
respect to those other interests and projects, which they 
are really in earnest to promote, though those concerns 
may lie in no greater proportion than the one in ques- 
tion does within the scope of their individual ability. 
The incubus has then vanished ; and they find them- 
selves in possession of a free agency, and a degree of 
power, which they will not patiently hear estimated in 
any such contemptuous terms. What is there then 
that should reduce them, as individual agents, to such 
utter and willing insignificance in the affair of which 
we are speaking ? Besides, they may form themselves, 
in indefinite number, into combination. And is there 
no power in any collective form in which they can be 
associated, save just that one in which the a^oreo-ation 
is constituted under the political shape and authority 
denominated a state ? Or is it at last that some alarm 
of superstitious loyalty comes over them ; that they 
grow uneasy in conscience at the high-toned censure 
they have been stimulated and betrayed to pronounce 
on the state ; that they relapse into the obsequiousness 
of hesitating, whether they should presume to do good 
of a kind winch the "Power ordained of God" has not 
seen fit to do ; that they must wait for the sanction of 
its great example ; that till the " shout of kings is 
among them" it were better not to march against the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 261 

vandalism and the paganism which are, the while, quite 
at their ease, destroying the people? 

But if such had always been the way in which private 
individuals, single or associated, had accounted of them- 
selves and their possible exertions, in regard to great 
general improvements, but very few would ever have 
been accomplished. For the case has commonly been, 
that the schemes of such improvements have originated 
with persons not invested with political power ; have 
been urged on by the accession and co-operation of such 
individuals ; and at length slowly and reluctantly ac- 
ceded to by the holders of dominion over the com- 
munity, always, through some malignant fatality, the 
last to admit what had long appeared to the majority 
of thinking men no less than demonstrative evidence 
of the propriety and advantage of the reformation. 

In all probability, the improvement of mankind is 
destined, under Providence, to advance nearly in pro- 
portion as good men feel the responsibility for it resting 
on themselves as individuals, and are actuated by a bold 
sentiment of independence, (humble at the same time, 
in reference to the necessity of Divine intervention,) in 
the prosecution of it. Each person who is standing 
still to look, with grief or indignation, at the evils which 
are overrunning the world, would do well to recollect 
what he may have read of some gallant partisan, who, 
perceiving where a prompt movement, with the com- 
paratively slender force at his own command, would 
make an impression infallibly tending to the success of 
the warfare, could not endure to lose the time till some 
great, sultan should find it convenient to come in slow 
march, and the pomp of state, to take on him the di- 
rection of the campaign. 

In laying this emphasis of incitement and hope on 
the exertions of good men as individuals, we cannot be 



262 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

understood to mean that the government of states, if 
ever the}'' did come to be intent on rendering the con- 
dition of society better and happier, could not contribute 
beyond all calculation to the force and efficacy of every 
project and measure for that grand purpose. How far 
from it ! it is melancholy to consider what they might 
do and do not. But it is because their history, thus 
far, affords such feeble prognostics of their becoming, 
till some better age, actuated by such a spirit, — it is 
because the Divine Governor has hitherto put upon 
them so little of the honor of being the instruments 
of his beneficence, — that the anticipations of good, and 
the exhortations to attempt it, are so peculiarly directed 
to its promoters in an individual capacity. 

Happily, the accusatory part of such exhortations is 
becoming, we trust we may say fast becoming, less ex- 
tensively applicable ; and we return with pleasure to 
the animating idea of that revolution of which we were 
noting the introductory signs. It is a revolution in the 
manner of estimating the souls of the people, and con- 
sequently in the judgment of what should be done for 
both their present and future welfare. Through many 
ages, that immense multitude had been but obscurely 
presented to view in any such character as that of 
rational, improvable creatures. They were recognized 
no otherwise than as one large mass of rude moral sub- 
stance, but faintly distinguishable into individuals ; ex- 
isting, and to be left to exist, in their own manner ; and 
that manner hardly worth concern or inquiry. Little 
consideration could there be of how much spiritual im- 
mortal essence must be going to waste, absorbed in the 
very earth, all over the wide field where the inferior 
portion of humanity was seen only through the gross 
medium of an economical estimate, by the more favored 
part of the race. But now it is as if a mist were ris- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 263 

mg and dispersing from that field, and leaving the mul- 
titude of possessors of uncultivated and degraded mind 
exhibited in a light in which they were never seen be- 
fore, except by the faithful promoters of Christianity, 
and a few philanthropists of a less special order. 

It is true, this manifestation forms so tragic a vision, 
that if we had only to behold it as a spectacle, we might 
well desire that the misty obscurity should descend on 
it again, to shroud it from sight ; while we should be 
left to indulge and elate our imaginations by dwelling 
on the pomps and splendors of the terrestrial scene, — 
the mighty empires, the heroes, the victories, the tri- 
umphs ; the refinements and enjoyments of the most 
highly cultivated of the race ; the brilliant performances 
of genius, and the astonishing reach of science. So 
the tempter would have beguiled our Lord into a com- 
placent contemplation of the kingdoms and glories of 
the world. But he was come to look on a different as- 
pect of it ! Nor could he be withdrawn from the 
gloomy view of its degradation and misery. And a 
good reason why. For the sole object for which he 
had appeared in the only world where temptation could 
even in form approach him was to begin in operation, 
and finish in virtue, a design for changing that state of 
degradation and misery. In the prosecution of such a 
design, and in the spirit of that divine benevolence in 
which it sprung, he could endure to fix on the melan- 
choly and odious character of the scene, the contem- 
plation which was vainly attempted to be diverted to 
any other of its aspects. What, indeed, could sublu- 
nary pomps and glories be to him in any case ; but em- 
phatically what, when his object was to redeem the 
people from darkness and destruction? 

Those who, actuated by a spirit in some humble re- 
semblance to his, have entered deeply into the state of 



264 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the people, such as it is found in our own nation, have 
often been appalled at the spectacle disclosed to them. 
They have been astonished to think, what can have 
been the direction, while successive ages have passed 
away, of so many thousands of acute and vigilant men- 
tal eyes, that so dreadful a sight should scarcely have 
been descried. They have been aware that in describing 
it as they actually saw it, they would be regarded by 
some as gloomy fanatics, tinctured with insanity by the 
influence of some austere creed ; and that others, of 
kinder nature, but whose sensibility has more of self- 
indulging refinement than tendency to active benevo- 
lence, would almost wish that so revolting an exhibition 
had never been made, though the fact be actually so. 
There may have been moments when they themselves 
have experienced a temporary recoil of their benevolent 
zeal, under the impression at once of the immensity of 
the evil, so defying the feebleness of their remedial 
means and efforts, and of its noisome qualify. At 
times, the rudeness of the subjects, and perhaps the 
ungracious reception and thankless requital of their 
disinterested labors, aggravating the general feeling of 
the miserableness (so to express it) of seeing so much 
misery, have lent seduction to the temptations to ease 
and self-indulgence. Why should they, just they of all 
men, condemn themselves to dwell so much in the 
most dreary climate of the moral world, when they 
could perhaps have taken their almost constant abode in 
a little elysium of elegant knowledge, taste, and refined 
society ? Then was the time to revert to the example 
of Him " who, though he was rich, for our sakes be- 
came poor." 

Or, again, they may have been betrayed to indulge 
too long in the bitter mood of thinking, how entirely 
the higher and more amply furnished powers leave 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 265 

such generous designs to proceed as they can, in the 
mere strength of private individual exertion. And they 
may have yielded to depressive feelings after the fervor 
of indignant ones ; for such indignation, unless quali- 
fied by the purest principle — unless it be the " anger 
that sins not" — is very apt, when it cools, to settle into 
misanthropic despondency. It is as if (they have said) 
armies and giants would stand aloof to amuse them- 
selves, while we are to be committed and abandoned in 
the ceaseless, unavailable toil of a conflict, which these 
armies and giants have no business even to exist as 
such but for the very purpose of waging. We are. if 
we will, — and if we will we may let it alone — to try to 
effect in diminutive pieces, and detached local efforts, a 
little share of that, to the accomplishment of which 
the greatest human force on earth might be applied on 
system, and to the widest compass. So they have said, 
perhaps, and been tempted to leave their object to its 5 
destiny. 

But really it is now too late for this resentful and 
desponding abandonment. They cannot now retire in 
the tragic dignity of despair. It must be some more 
forlorn predicament that would allow them any grace 
of rhetoric in saying, as in parody of Cato, " Witness 
heaven and earth, that we have done our duty, but the 
stars and fate are against us ; and here it becomes us 
to terminate a strife, which would degenerate into the 
ridiculous, if prosecuted against impossibilities." On 
the contrary, the zeal which could begin so onerous a 
work, and prosecute it thus far, could not now remit 
without convicting its past ardor of cowardice lurking 
under its temporary semblance of bravery. Is it for 
the projectors of a noble edifice of public utility, to 
abandon the undertaking when it has risen from its 
foundation to be seen above the ground; or is just 
23 



266 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

come to be level with the surface of the waters, in de- 
fiance of which it has been commenced, and the vio- 
lence of which it was designed to control, or the un- 
fordable depths and streams of which it was to bear 
people over? Let the promoters of education and 
Christian knowledge among the inferior classes, reflect 
what has already been accomplished ; though regard- 
ing it as quite the incipient stage. It is most truly as 
yet "the day of small things;" and shall they despise 
it, from an idea of what it might have been if the great 
powers had been directed to its advancement ? They 
have found that in the good cause thus unaided they 
have not wholly labored in vain ; that it can be brought 
in contact with a considerable portion of what would 
otherwise be so much human existence abandoned; 
and that already, as from the garments of the Divine 
Healer of diseases, a sanative virtue goes out of it. 
Let them recount the individuals they have seen, and 
not despond as to many more, rescued from what had 
all the signs of a destination to the lowest debasement, 
and utter ruin ; some of whom are returning animated 
thanks, and will do so in the hour of death, for what 
these, their best human friends, have been the means 
of imparting to them. Let them recollect of how 
many families they have seen the domestic condition 
pleasingly, and in some instances eminently and delight- 
fully amended. And let them reflect how they have 
trampled down prejudices, nearly silenced a heathenish 
clamor, and provoked the imitative and rival efforts of 
many who would, but for them, have been willing 
enough for all such schemes to lie in abeyance to the 
end of time. Let them think of all this, and faithfully 
persist in the trial what it may please God that they 
shall accomplish, whether the possessors of national 
power will acknowledge his demand for such an appli- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 267 

cation of it or not ; whether, when the infinite import- 
ance of the concern is represented to them, they will 
hear, or whether they will forbear. 

But let them not doubt that the time will come, 
when the rulers and the ascendant classes in states 
will comprehend it to be their best policy to promote 
all possible improvement of the people. It will be 
given to them to understand, that the highest glory of 
those at the head of great communities, must consist 
in the eminence attained by those communities gener- 
ally, in whatever it is that constitutes the worth, the 
honor, the happiness, of individuals; a glory with 
which would be combined the advantage that the office 
of presiding over such a nation could be administered 
in a liberal spirit. They will one day have learned to 
esteem it a far nobler form of power to lead and direct 
an immense society of intelligent minds, than to delude, 
coerce, and drive a vast semi-barbarous herd. Provi- 
dence surely will one day, in the progress of society, 
confer on it such wise and virtuous rulers as can feel, 
that it is better for them to have a people who can un- 
derstand and rationally approve, when deserving of ap- 
probation, their system and measures, than one bent in 
stupid submission, even if ignorance could hencefor- 
ward suffice (which it cannot) to retain the people in 
that posture ; better, therefore, by a still stronger 
reason, than to have a people fermenting in ignorant 
disaffection, constantly believing the governors to be in 
the wrong, and without the sense to comprehend any 
arguments in justification, excepting such as might be 
addressed in the shape of bribes to corruption. And 
a time will come when it will not be left to the philan- 
thropic or censorial speculatists alone, to make the 
comparative estimate between what has been effected 
by the enormously expensive apparatus of coercive and 



268 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

penal administration — the prisons, prosecutions, trans- 
portations, and a large military police, (things quite 
necessary in our past and present national condition,) 
— and what might have been effected by one half of 
that expenditure devoted to popular reformation, to be 
accomplished by means of schools, and every practica- 
ble variety of methods for placing men's judgment and 
conscience as the "lion in the way," when they are 
inclined and tempted to go wrong. — All this will come 
to pass at length. And if the promoters of the best 
designs see cause to fear that the time is remote, this 
should but enforce upon them the more strongly the 
admonition that no time is theirs, but the present. 

It was not possible to pursue the long course of these 
observations so nearly to the conclusion, without being 
reminded still again of what we have adverted to before, 
that there will be persons ready to impute sanguine ex- 
travagance to our expectations of the result of such an 
order of means and exertions, for the improvement of 
the education and mental condition of the people, as we 
see already beginning to work. When the means are 
of so little splendid a quality, it will be said, by what 
inflation of fancy is their power admeasured to such 
effects ? 

And what is it, then, and how much, that is expect- 
ed as the result, by the zealous advocates of schools, 
and the whole order of expedients, for the instruction 
of that part of the rising generation till lately so 
neglected? Are they heard maintaining that the com- 
munication of knowledge, or true notions of things, to 
youthful minds, will infallibly ensure their virtue and 
happiness ? They are not quite so new to the world, 
to experimental labor in the business of tuition, or to 
self-observation. Their vigilance would hardly over- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 269 

look such a circumstance as the very different degree 
of assurance with which the effects may be predicted, 
of ignorance on the one hand, and of knowledge on the 
other. There is very nearly an absolute certainty of 
success in the method for making clowns, sots, vaga- 
bonds, and ruffians. You may safely leave it to them- 
selves to carry on the process for becoming complete. 
Let human creatures grow up without discipline, desti- 
tute therefore of salutary information, sound judgment, 
or any conscience but what will shape itself to what- 
ever they like, serving in the manner of some vile friar 
pander in the old plays, — and no one takes any credit 
for foresight in saying they will be a noxious burden 
on the earth ; except indeed in those tracts of it where 
they seem to have their appropriate place and business, 
in being matched against the wolves and bears of the 
wilderness. When they infest what should be a civilized 
and Christianized part of the world, the philanthropist 
is sometimes put in doubt whether to repress, or in- 
dulge, the sentiment which tempts him to complacency 
in the operation of an epidemic which is thinning their 
numbers. 

The consequences of ignorance are certain, unless al- 
most a miracle interpose ; but unhappily those of knowl- 
edge are of diffident and restricted calculation ; unless 
we could make a trifle of the testimony of all ages, 
and suppress the evidence of present experience, that 
men may see and approve the better, and yet follow 
the worse. It is the hapless predicament of our nature, 
that the noblest of its powers, the understanding, has 
but most imperfectly and precariously that command- 
ing hold on the others, which is essential to the good 
order of the soul. Our constitution is like a machine 
in which there is a constant liability of the secondary 
wheels to be thrown out of the catch and grapple of 
23* 



270 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

the master one. And worse than so, these powers which 
ought to be subordinate and obedient to the under- 
standing, are not left to stand still when detached from 
its control. They have a strong activity of their own, 
from the impulse of other principles : indeed, it is this 
impulse that causes the detachment. It is frightful to 
look at the evidence from facts, that these active powers 
may grow strong in the perversity which will set the 
judgment at defiance, during the very time that it is 
successfully training to a competence for dictating to 
them what is right. The assertions of those who are 
determined to find the chief or only cause of the wrong 
direction of the passions and will in misapprehension of 
the understanding, are a gross assumption, in a ques- 
tion of fact, against an infinite crowd of facts pressing 
round with their evidence. This evidence is offered 
by men without number distinctly and deliberately 
acknowledging their conviction of the evil quality and 
fatal consequences, of courses which they are soon 
afterwards seen pursuing, and without the smallest 
pretence of a change of opinion ; by the same men in 
more advanced stages still owning the same conviction, 
and sometimes in strong terms of self-reproach, in the 
checks and pauses of their career ; and by men in the 
near prospect of death and judgment expressing, in 
bitter regret, the acknowledgment that they had per- 
sisted in acting wrong when they knew better. And 
this assumption, made against such evidence, is to be 
maintained for no better reason, that appears, than a 
wilful determination that human nature cannot, must 
not, shall not, be so absurd and depraved as to be 
capable of such madness : as if human nature were 
taking the smallest trouble to put on any disguise be- 
fore them, to beguile them into a good opinion ; as if 
it could be cajoled by their flattery to assume even a 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 27l 

semblance of deserving it ; as if it had the complaisance 
to check one bad propensity, to save them from stand- 
ing contradicted and exposed to ridicule for speaking 
of it with indulgence or respect ; as if it stayed or cared 
to thank them for their pains in attempting to make 
out a plausible extenuation. It has, and keeps, and 
shows its character, in perfect indifference to the puz- 
zled efforts of its apologists to reduce its moral turpi- 
tude to just so much error of the understanding. But, 
as for understanding — it should be time to look to their 
own, when they find themselves asserting, in other 
words, that there is actually as much virtue in the world 
as there is knowledge of its principles and laws. We 
should rather have surmised that, deplorably deficient 
as that knowledge is, the reduction of a fifth or tenth 
part of it to practice would make a glorious change in 
England and Europe. 

The persons, therefore, whose zeal is combined with 
knowledge in the prosecution of plans for the extension 
of education, proceed on a calculation of an effect more 
limited, in apparent proportion to the means, and with 
less certainty of even that more limited measure in any 
single instance, than they would have been justified in 
anticipating in many other departments of operation. 
They would, for example, predict more positively the 
results of an undertaking to cultivate any tract of waste 
land, to reclaim a bog, or to render mechanical forces 
available in an untried mode of application ; or, in many 
cases, the decided success of the healing art as applied 
to a diseased body. They must needs be moderate in 
their confidence of calculation for good, on a moral 
nature whose corruption would yield an enemy of man- 
kind a gratifying probability in calculating for evil. 
In comparing these opposite calculations, they would 
be glad if they might make an exchange of the respective 



272 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

probabilities. That is to say, let a man, if such there 
be, who could be pleased with the depravity and misery 
of the race, a sagacious judge too, of their moral con- 
stitution, and a veteran observer of their conduct, — 
'efc him survey with the look of an evil spirit a hundred 
children in one of the benevolent schools, and indulge 
himself in prognosticating, on the strength of what he 
knows of human nature, the proportion, in numbers 
and degree, in which these children will, in subsequent 
life, exemplify the failure of what is done for, their 
wisdom and welfare ; — let him make his calculation, 
and, Ave say, there may be times when the friends of 
these institutions would be glad to transfer the quantity 
of probability from his side to theirs ; would feel they 
should be happy if the proportion in which they fear 
he may be right in calculating on evil from the nature 
of the beings under discipline, were, instead, the pro- 
portion in which it is rational to reckon on good from 
the efficacy of that discipline. " Evil, be thou my good," 
might be their involuntary apostrophe, in the sense of 
wishing to possess the stronger power, transmuted to 
the better quality. 

But we shall know where to stop in the course of 
observations of this darkening color; and shall take 
off the point of the derider's taunt, just forthcoming, 
that we are here unsaying, in effect, all that we have 
been so laboriously urging about the vast benefit of 
knowledge to the people. It was proper to show, that the 
prosecutors of these designs are not suffering themselves 
to be duped out of a perception of what there is, in the 
nature of the youthful subjects, to counteract the inten- 
tion of the discipline, and with too certain a power to limit 

ts efficacy to a very partial measure of the effect desired. 

These projectors might fairly be required to prove they 
are not unknowing enthusiasts ; but then, in keeping 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 273 

clear of the vain extravagances of expectation, they 
are not to surrender their confidence that something 
great and important can be done : it should be possible 
for a man to be sober, short of being dead. They are 
not to gravitate into a state of feeling as if they 
thought the understanding and the moral powers are 
but casually associated in the mind; as if an important 
communication to the one, might, so to speak, never be 
heard of by the others ; as if these subordinates had 
just one sole principle of action — that of disobeying 
their chief, so that it could be of no use to appeal to 
the master of the house respecting the conduct of his 
inmates ; as if, therefore, all presumption of a relation 
between means and ends, as a ground of confidence in 
the efficacy of popular instruction, must be illusory. 
It might not indeed be amiss for them to be told that 
the case is so, by those who would desire, from what- 
ever motive, to repress their efforts and defeat their 
designs. For so downright a blow at the vital principle 
of their favorite object would but serve to provoke 
them to ascertain more definitely what there really is 
for them to found their schemes and hopes upon, and 
therefore to verify to themselves the reasons they have 
for persisting, in assurance that the labor will be far 
from wholly lost. And for this assurance it is, at the 
very lowest, self-evident, that there is at any rate such 
an efficacy in cultivation, as to give a certainty that a 
well-cultivated people cannot remain on the same de- 
graded moral level as a neglected ignorant one — or any- 
where near it. None of those even that value such 
designs the least, ever pretend to foresee, in the event 
of their being carried into effect, an undiminished 
prevalence of rudeness and brutality of manners, of 
delight in spectacles and amusements of cruelty, of 
noisy revelry, of sottish intemperance, or of disregard 



«.74 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

of character. It is not pretended to be foreseen, that 
the poorer classes will then continue to display so much 
of that almost desperate improvidence respecting their 
temporal means and prospects, which has aggravated 
the calamities of the present times. It is not predicted 
that a universal school-discipline will bring up several 
millions to the neglect, and many of them in an im- 
pudent contempt, of attendance on the ministrations of 
religion. The result will at all hazards, by every one's 
acknowledgment, be the contrary of this. 

But more specifically : — The promoters of the plans 
of popular education see a most important advantage 
gained in the very outset, in the obvious fact, that in 
their schools a very large portion of time is employed 
well, that otherwise would infallibly be employed ill. 
Let any one introduce himself into one of these places 
of concourse, where there has been time to mature the 
arrangements. He should not enter as an important 
personage, in patronizing and judicial state, as if to 
demand the respectful looks of the whole tribe from 
their attention to their printed rudiments and their 
slates ; but glide in as a quiet observer, just to sur- 
vey at his leisure the character and operations of the 
scene. Undoubtedly he may descry here and there the 
signs of inattention, weariness or vacancy, not to say 
of perverseness. Even these individuals, however, are 
out of the way of practical harm ; and at the same 
time he will see a multitude of youthful spirits acknow- 
ledging the duty of directing their best attention to 
something altogether foreign to their wild amusements ; 
of making a rather protracted effort in one mode or 
another of the strange business of thinking. He will 
perceive in many the unequivocal indications of a 
serious and earnest effort made to acquire, with the aid 
of visible signs and implements, a command of what is 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 2*75 

invisible and immaterial. They are thus rising from 
the mere animal state to tread in the precincts of an 
intellectual economy ; the economy of thought and 
truth, in which they are to live forever; and never, in 
all futurity, will they have to regret, for itself,* this 
period and part of their employments. He will be 
delighted to think how many regulated actions of the 
mind, how many just ideas distinctly admitted, that 
were unknown or unimpressed at the beginning of the 
day's exercise, (and among these ideas, some to remind 
them of God and their highest interest,) there will have 
been by the time the busy and well-ordered company 
breaks up in the evening, and leaves silence within 
these walls. He will not indeed grow romantic in hope ; 
he knows the nature of which these beings partake ; 
knows therefore that the desired results of this process 
will but partially follow; but still rejoices to think those 
partial results which will most certainly follow, will be 
worth incomparably more than all they will have cost 
to the learners, or the teachers, or the patrons. 

Now let him, when he has contemplated this scene, 
consider how the greatest part of this numerous com- 
pany would have been employed during the same hours, 
whether of the Sabbath or other days, but for such a 
provision of means for their instruction. And, for the 
contrast, he has only to leave the school, and walk a 
mile round the neighborhood, in which, it will be very 
wonderful, (we may say this of most parts of England,) 
if he shall not, in a populous district, especially near a 

* For itself — a phrase of qualification inserted to meet the 
captious remark, that there have been instances of bad men, 
under the reproach of conscience and the dread of consequences, 
expressing a regret that they had ever been "well instructed, since 
this was an aggravation of their guilt, and perhaps had subserved 
their evil propensities with the more effectual means and ability. 



2'IQ ON POPULAR .GNORANCE. 

great town, and on a fine day, meet with a great num- 
ber of wretched, disgusting imps, straggling or in knots, 
in the activity of mischief and nuisance, or at least the 
full cry of vile and profane language ; with here and 
there, as a lord among them, an elder larger one grow- 
ing fast into an insolent adult blackguard. He may 
make the comparison, quite sure that such as they are, 
and so employed, would many now under the salutary 
discipline of yonder school have been, but for its insti- 
tution. But the two classes so beheld in contrast, 
might they not seem to belong to two different nations ? 
Do they not seem growing into two extremely different 
orders of character ? Do they not even seem preparing 
for different worlds in the final distribution ? 

The friends of these designs for a general and highly 
improved education, may proceed further in this course 
of verifying to themselves the grounds of their assur- 
ance of happy consequences. A number of ideas, the 
most important that were ever formed in human thought, 
or imparted to men from the Supreme Mind, will be so 
communicated and impressed in these institutions, that 
it is absolutely certain they will be fixed irrevocably in 
the minds of the pupils. And in the case of many, if 
not the majority of these destined adventurers into the 
temptations of life, these important ideas, thus inserted 
deep in their souls, will distinctly present themselves to 
judgment and conscience an incalculable number of 
times. What a number, if the sum of all these remi- 
niscences, in all the minds now assembled in a numerous 
school, could be conjectured ! But if one in a hun- 
dred of these recollections, if one in a thousand, shall 
be efficacious, who can compute the amount of the good 
resulting from the instruction which shall have so en- 
forced and fixed these ideas that they shall inevitably 
be thus recollected ? And is it altogether out of reason 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 277 

to hope that the desired efficacy will, far oftener than 
once in a thousand times, attend the luminous rising 
again of a solemn idea to the view of the mind ! Is 
still less than this to be predicted for our unhappy 
nature, while, however fallen, it is not abandoned by 
the care of its Creator ! 

, The institutions themselves will gradually improve, 
in both the method and the compass of their discipline. 
They will acquire a more vigorous mechanism, and a 
more decidedly intellectual character. In this latter 
respect, it is but comparatively of late years that schools 
for the inferior classes have ventured anything beyond 
the humblest pretensions. Mental cultivation — en- 
larged knowledge — elements of science — habit of think- 
ing — exercise of judgment — free and enlightened opinion 
— higher grade in society — were terms which they were 
to be reverently cautious of taking in vain. There 
would have been an offensive sound in such phrases, as 
seeming to betray somewhat of the impertinence of a 
disposition, (for the idea of the practicability of any 
such invasion would have been scorned,) to encroach 
on a ground exclusively appropriate to the superior 
orders. Schools for the poor were to be as little as 
possible scholastic. They were to be kept down to the 
lowest level of the workshop, excepting perhaps in one 
particular — that of working hard : for the scholars 
were to throw time away rather than be occupied with 
anything beyond the merest rudiments. The advocates 
and the petitioners for aid of such schools, were to 
avow and plead how little it was. that they pretended 
or presumed to teach. The argument in their behalf 
was either to begin or end with saying, that they taught 
only reading and writing ; or if it could not be denied 
that there was to be some meddling with arithmetic 
and grammar, — we may safely appeal to some of the 
24 



2*78 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

veterans of these pleaders, whether they did not, thirty 
or forty years since, bring out this addition with the 
management and hesitation of a confession and apology. 
It is a prominent characteristic of that happy revolu- 
tion we have spoken of as in commencement, that this 
aristocratic notion of education is breaking up. The 
theory of the subject is loosening into enlargement, and 
will cease by degrees to impose a niggardly restriction 
on the extent of the cultivation, proper to be attempted 
in schools for the inferiors of the community. 

As these institutions go on, augmenting in number 
and improving in organization, their pupils will bring 
their quality and efficacy to the proof, as they grow to 
maturity, and go forth to act their part in society. And 
there can be no doubt, that while too many of them 
may be mournful exemplifications of the power with 
which the evil genius of the corrupt nature, combined 
with the infection of a bad world, resists the better in- 
fluences of instruction, and may, after the advantage 
of such an introductory stage, be carried down towards 
the old debasement, a very considerable proportion will 
take and permanently maintain a far higher ground. 
They will have become imbued with an element, which 
must put them in strong repulsion to that coarse vulgar 
that will be sure to continue in existence, in this country, 
long enough to be a trial of the moral taste of this bet- 
ter cultivated race. It will be seen that they cannot 
associate with it by choice, and in the spirit of com- 
panionship. And while they are thus withheld on their 
part, from approximating, it may be hoped that in cer- 
tain better disposed parts of that vulgar, there may be 
a conversion of the repelling principle into an impulse 
to approach and join them on their own ground. There 
will be numbers among it who cannot be so entirely 
insensate or perverse, as to look with carelessness at the 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 2*79 

advantages obtained through the sole medium of per- 
sonal improvement, by those who had otherwise been 
exactly on the same level of low resources and estima- 
tion as themselves. The effect of this view on pride, 
in some, and on better propensities, it may be hoped, 
in others, will be to excite them to make their way up- 
ward to a community which, they will clearly see, 
could commit no greater folly than to come downward 
to them. And we will presume a friendly disposition 
in most of those who shall have been raised to this 
higher standing, to meet such aspirers and help them 
to ascend. 

And while they will thus draw upward the less im- 
movable and hopeless part of the mass below them, 
they will themselves, on the other hand, be placed, by 
the respectability of their understanding and manners, 
within the influence of the higher cultivation of the 
classes above them ; a great advantage, as we have 
taken a former occasion to notice : — a great advantage, 
that is to say, if the cultivation among those classes he 
generally of such a quality and measure, that the peo- 
ple could not be brought a few degrees nearer to them 
without becoming, through the effect of their example, 
more in love with sense, knowledge, and propriety of 
conduct. For it were somewhat too much of simpli- 
city, perhaps, to take it for quite a thing of course that 
the people would always perceive such intellectual ac- 
complishments as would keep them modest or humble 
in their estimate of their own, and such liberal spirit 
and manners as would at once command their respect 
and conduce to their refinement, when they made any 
approach 1o a communication with the classes superior 
in possessions and station. If this might have been 
assumed as a thing of course, and if therefore it might 
have been confidently reckoned on, that the more im- 



280 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

proving of the people would receive from the ranks 
above them a salutary influence, similar to that which 
we have been supposing they will themselves exert on 
a part of the vulgar mass below them, there had been 
a happy omen for the community ; and if it may not be 
so assumed, are we to have the disgraceful deficiencies 
of the upper classes pleaded as an argument against 
raising the lower from their degradation? Must the 
multitude flounder along the mud at the bottom of the 
upward slope, because their betters will not be at the 
cost of making for themselves a higher terraced road 
across it than that they are now walking on ? 

But it would be an admirable turn to make the low- 
er orders act beneficially on the higher. And it is an 
important advantage likely to accrue from the better 
education of the common people, that their rising at- 
tainments would compel not a few of their superiors 
to look to the state of their own mental pretensions, 
on perceiving that this, at last, was becoming a ground 
on which, in no small part, their precedence was to be 
measured. Surely it would be a most excellent thing, 
that they should find themselves thus incommodiously 
pressed upon by the only circumstance, perhaps, that 
.could make them sensible there are more kinds of 
poverty than that single one to which alone they had 
hitherto attached ideas of disgrace; and should be 
forced to preserve that ascendency for which wealth 
and station would formerly suffice, at the cost, now, of 
a good deal more reading, thinking, and general self- 
discipline. And would it be a worthy sacrifice, that 
to spare some substantial agriculturalists, idle gentle- 
men, and sporting or promenading ecclesiastics, such 
an afflictive necessity, the actual tillers of the ground, 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 281 

and the workers in manufacture and mechanics, should 
continue to be kept in stupid ignorance ? 

It is very possible this may excite a smile, as the 
threatening of a necessity or a danger to these privi- 
leged persons, which it is thought they may be com- 
fortably assured is very remote. This danger (namely, 
that a good many of them, or rather of those who are 
coming in the course of nature to succeed them in the 
same rank, will find that its relative consequence cannot 
be sustained but at a very considerably higher pitch 
of mental qualification) is threatened upon no stronger 
presages than the following : — Allow us first to take it 
for granted, that it is not a very protracted length of 
time that is to pass away before the case comes to be, 
that a large proportion of the children of the lower 
classes are trained, through a course of assiduous in- 
struction and exercise in the most valuable knowledge, 
during a series of years, in schools which everything 
possible is done to render efficient. Then, if we in- 
clude in one computation all the time they will have 
spent in real mental effort and acquirement there, and 
all those pieces and intervals of time which we may 
reasonably hope that many of them will improve to 
the same purpose in the subsequent years, a very great 
number of them will have employed, by the time they 
reach middle age, many thousands of hours more than 
people in their condition have heretofore done, in a 
way the most directly tending to place them greatly 
further on in whatever of importance for repute and 
authority intelligence is to bear in society. And how 
must we be estimating the natural capacities of these 
inferior classes, or the perceptions of the higher, not 
to foresee as a consequence, that these latter will find 
their relative situation greatly altered, with respect to 
the measure of knowledge and mental power requisite 
24* 



282 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

as. one most essential constituent of their superiority, 
in order to command the unfeigned deference of their 
inferiors ? 

Our strenuous promoters of the schemes for cul- 
tivating the minds of all the people, are not afraid of 
professing to foresee, that when schools, of that com- 
pletely disciplinarian organization which they are, we 
hope, gradually to attain, shall have become general, 
and shall be vigorously seconded by all those auxiliary 
expedients for popular instruction which are also in 
progress, a very pleasing modification will become ap- 
parent in the character, the moral color, if we might 
so express it, of the people's ordinary employment. 
The young persons so instructed, being appointed, for 
the most part, to the same occupations to which they 
would have been destined had they grown up in utter 
ignorance and vulgarity, are expected to give evidence 
that the meanness, the debasement almost, which had 
characterized many of those occupations in the view of 
the more refined classes, was in truth the debasement 
of the men more than of the callings ; which will come 
to be in more honorable estimation as associated with 
the sense, decorum, and self-respect of the performers, 
than they were while blended and polluted with all the 
low habits, manners, and language, of ignorance and 
vulgar grossness. And besides, there is the consider- 
ation of the different degrees of merit in the perform- 
ance itself; and who will be the persons most likely 
to excel, in the many branches of workmanship and 
business which admit of being better done in propor- 
tion to the degree of intelligence directed upon them ? 
And again, who will be most in requisition for those 
offices of management and superintendence, where 
something must be confided to judgment and discre- 
tion, and where the value is felt, (often vexatiously felt 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 283 

from the want,) of some capacity of combination and 
foresight ? 

Such as these are among the subordinate benefits 
reasonably, we might say infallibly, calculated upon. 
Our philanthropists are confident in foreseeing also, 
that very many of these better educated young per- 
sons will be valuable co-operators with all who may be 
more formally employed in instruction, against that ig- 
norance from which themselves have been so happily 
saved ; will exert an influence, by their example and 
the steady avowal of their principles, against vice and 
folly in their vicinity ; and will be useful advisers of 
their neighbors in their perplexities, and sometimes 
moderators in their discords. It is predicted, with a 
confidence so much resting on general grounds of prob- 
ability, as hardly to need the instances already afforded 
in various parts of the country to confirm it, that here 
and there one of 'the well-instructed humbler class will 
become a competent and useful public teacher of the 
most important truth. It is, in short, anticipated with 
delightful assurance, that great numbers of those who 
shall go forth from under the friendly guardianship 
which will take the charge of their youthful minds, will 
be examples through life and at its conclusion, of the 
power and felicity of religion. 

Here we can suppose it not improbable that some one 
may, in pointed terms, put the question, — Do you then, 
at last, mean to affirm that you can, by the proposed 
course, by any course, of discipline, absolutely secure that 
effectual operation and ascendency of religion in the 
mind, which shall place it in the right condition toward 
God, and in a state of fitness for passing, without fear or 
danger, into the scenes of its future endless existence ? 

We think the cautious limitation of language, hitherto 



284 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

observed in setting forth our expectations, might pre- 
clude such a question. But let it be asked, since there 
can be no difficulty to reply. We do not affirm that 
any form of discipline, the wisest and best in the power 
of the wisest and best men to apply, is competent of 
itself thus to subject the mind decidedly and permanently 
to the power of religion. On the contrary, we believe 
that grand effect can be accomplished only by a special 
influence of the Divine Being, operating by the means 
applied in a well-judged system of instruction, or, if he 
pleases, independently of them. But next, it is per- 
fectly certain, notwithstanding, that the application of 
these human means will, in a multitude of instances, be 
efficacious to that most happy end. 

This certainty arises from a few very, plain general 
considerations. The first is, that the whole system of 
means appointed by the Almighty to be employed as a 
human process for presenting religion -solemnly in view 
before men's minds, and enforcing it on them, is an 
appointment expressly intended for working that great 
effect which secures their final felicity ; though to what 
extent in point of number is altogether unknown to the 
subordinate agents. They are perfectly certain, in 
employing the appointed expedients in prosecution of 
the work, that they must be proceeding on the strength 
of a positive relation subsisting between those means 
and the results to be realized, in what instances, in what 
measure, at what time, it shall please the sovereign 
Power. The appointment cannot be one of mere ex- 
ercise for the faculties and submissive obedience of 
those who are summoned to be active in its execution. 

Accordingly, there are in the divine revelation very 
many explicit and animating assurances, that their ex- 
ertions shall certainly be in a measure effectual to the 
proposed end. And if these assurances are made in 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 285 

favor of the exertions for inculcating religion generally, 
that is, on men of all conditions and ages, they may be 
assumed as giving special encouragement to those for 
impressing it on young minds, before they can be pre- 
occupied and hardened by the depravities of the world. 
There is plainly the more hope for the efficacy of those 
exertions the less there is to frustrate them. But be- 
sides, the authority itself, which has assured a measure 
of success to religious instruction as administered gene- 
rally, has marked with peculiar strength the promise of 
its success as applied to the young ; thus affording rays 
of hope which have in ten thousand instances animated 
the diligence of pious parents, and the other benevolent 
instructors of children. 

There is also palpable matter of fact to the point, 
that an education which combines the discipline of the 
conscience and the intellectual faculty will be rendered, 
in many instances, efficacious to the formation of a 
religious character. This obvious fact is, that a much 
greater proportion of the persons so educated do actually 
become the subjects of religion, than of a similar num- 
ber of those brought up in ignorance and profligacy. 
Take collectively any number of families in which such 
an education prevails, and the same number in which 
it does not, and follow the young persons respectively 
into subsequent life. But any one who hears the sug- 
gestion, feels there is no need to wait the lapse of time 
and follow their actual course. As instructed by what 
he has already seen in society, he can go forward with 
them prophetically, with perfect certainty that many 
more of the one tribe than that of the other, will become 
persons not only of moral respectability but decided 
piety. Any one that should assert respecting them 
that the probabilities are equal and indifferent, would 
be considered as sporting a wilful absurdity, or betray- 



286 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

ing that he is one of those who did not come into the 
world for anything they can learn in it. And the ex- 
perience which thus authorizes a perfect confidence of 
prediction, is evidence that, though discipline must 
wholly disclaim an absolute power to effect the great 
object in question, there is, nevertheless, such a con- 
stitution of things that it most certainly will, as an 
instrumental cause, in many instances effect it. 

The state of the matter, then, is very simple. The 
Supreme Cause of men's being " made wise to salva- 
tion," in appointing a system of means, to be put by 
human activit}^ in operation toward this effect, has also 
appointed that in this operation they shall infallibly be 
attended with a measure of success in accomplishing 
that highest good, — a measure which was not to be ac- 
complished otherwise than by such means. So much 
he has signified to men as an absolute certainty : but 
then, he has connected this certainty in an arbitrary, 
and as to our knowledge, indefinite manner with the 
system. It is a certainty connected with the system 
as taken generally and comprehensively ; and which it 
is not given to us to affix to the particular instances in 
which the success will take place. It is a Divine Voli- 
tion suspended over the whole scene of cultivation; 
like a cloud from which we cannot tell where precisely 
the shower to fertilize it will fall, certain, however, that 
there are spots whose verdure and flowers will tell after 
awhile. The agents under the Sovereign Dispenser 
are to proceed on this positive assurance that the success 
shall be somewhere, though they cannot know that it 
will be in this one instance, or in the other : " In the 
morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not 
thy hand ; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, 
this, or that." If they rate the value of their agency 
so high, as to hold it derogatory to their dignity that 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 287 

any part of their labors should be performed under 
the condition of possibly being unsuccessful, they may 
be assured that such is not exactly the estimate of Him 
to whom they look for the acceptance of their services, 
and for the reward. 

But it may be added, that the great majority of those 
who are intent on the schemes for enlightening and 
reforming mankind, are entertaining a confident hope 
of the approach of a period, when the success will be 
far greater in proportion to the measure of exertion 
in every department of the system of instrumentality 
for that grand object. We cherish this confidence, 
not on the strength of any pretension to be able to 
resolve prophetic emblems and numbers, into precise 
dates and events of the present and approaching times. 
It rests on a more general mode of apprehending a rela- 
tion between the extraordinary indications of the period 
we live in, and the substantial purport of the divine 
predictions. There unquestionably gleams forth, through 
the plainer lines, and through the mystical imagery of 
prophecy, the vision of a better age, in which the appli- 
cation of the truths of religion to men's minds will be 
irresistible. And what should more naturally be inter- 
preted as one of the dawning signs of its approach, than 
a new spirit come into action with insuppressible im- 
pulse, at once to dispel the fog from their intellects and 
bring the heavenly light to shine close upon them ; 
accompanied by a prodigious convulsion in the old sys- 
tem of the world, which hardly recognized in the inferior 
millions the very existence of souls to need or be worth 
such an illumination? It is true that an eruptive 
activity of evil, beyond what was witnessed by our 
forefathers, has attended and followed that convulsion ; 
as mephitic exhalations are emitted through the rents 
of an earthquake. Viewed in itself, this outbreak of 



288 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE, 

the bad principles and passions might seem to portend 
anything rather than a grand improvement in the state 
of a nation or of mankind. It appears like an actual 
augmentation of the evil previously existing. But it 
should rather be regarded as the setting loose of the 
noxious elements accumulated and rankling under the 
old system ; a phenomenon inevitably attendant on its 
breaking up, by a catastrophe absolutely necessary to 
open and clear the field for operations on the great scale 
against those evils themselves, and to give scope and 
means for the advancement toward a better condition 
of humanity. 

The laborers in the institutions for instructing the 
young descendants of an ill-fated generation, may often 
regret to perceive how little the process is as yet in- 
formed with the energy which is ultimately to pervade 
the world. But let them regard as one great undivided 
economy and train of operation, these initiatory efforts 
and all that is to follow, till that time " when all shall 
know the Lord ;" and take by anticipation, as in frater- 
nity -with the happier future laborers, their just share 
of that ultimate triumph. Those active spirits, in the 
happier periods, will look back with this sentiment of 
kindred and complacency to those who sustained the 
earlier toils of the good cause, and did not suffer their 
zeal to languish under the comparative smallness of 
their success. 

We shall conclude with a few sentences in the way 
of reply to another question, which we can surmise 
there may be persons ready to ask, after this long itera- 
tion of the assertion of the necessity of knowledge to 
the common people. The question would be to this 
effect : What do you, all this while, mean to assign as 
the measure of knowledge proper for the people to be 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 289 

put in possession of? — for you do not specify the kinds, 
or limit the extent : you talk in vague general terms of 
mental improvement ; you leave the whole matter in- 
definite ; and for all that appears, the people are never 
o know when they know enough. 

It is answered, that we do leave the extent undefined, 
and should request to be informed where, and why, the 
ine of circumscription and exclusion should be drawn. 

Is it, we could really wish to know, a point at all yet 
decided, wherein consist the value and importance of 
the human nature ? Any liberal scheme for its uni- 
versal cultivation is met by such a jealous parsimony 
toward the common people, such a ready imputation of 
wild theory, such protesting declamations against the 
mischief of practically applying abstract principles, 
such an undisguised or betrayed precedence given to 
mere interests of state, and those perhaps very sordid 
ones, before all others, and such whimsical prescrip- 
tions for making a salutary compound of a little knowl- 
edge and much ignorance, — that it might seem to be 
doubtful, after all, whether the human nature, in the 
mass of mankind at least, be of any such consistence, 
or for any such purpose, as is affirmed in our common- 
places on the subject. It is uniformly assumed in the 
language of divines, and of the philosophers in most 
repute, that the worth, the dignity, the importance of 
man, are in his rational, immortal nature; and that 
therefore the best condition of that is his true felicity 
and glory, and the object chiefly to be aimed at in all 
that is done by him, and for him, on earth. But 
whether this should be regarded as anything more 
than the elated faith of ascetics, a fine dogma of aca- 
demics, or a theme for show in the pomp of moral 
rhetoric ? For we often see, and it is very striking to 
see, how principles which are suffered to pass for infal- 
25 



290 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

iible truth while content to stay within the province of 
speculation, and to be pronounced as mere doctrine, 
may be disowned and repelled when they come de- 
manding to have their appropriate place and influence 
in the practical sphere. Even many pretended advo- 
cates of Christianity, who in naming certain principles 
would seem to make them of the very essence of the 
moral part of that religion, and, in discoursing merely 
as religionists, will insist on their vital importance, will 
yet shuffle and equivocate about these principles, and 
in effect set them aside, when they are attempted to be 
applied to some of their most legitimate uses. If, for 
example, these religionists are among the servile ad- 
herents of corrupted institutions and iniquity invested 
with power, they will easily find accommodating inter- 
pretations, or pleas of exemption from the direct au- 
thority, of some of the most sacred maxims of their 
professed religion. Serve the true God when we hap- 
pen to be in the right place ; but at all events we must 
attend our master to pay homage in the temple of 
Rimmon, or, should he please to require it, that of 
Moloch, — with this signal difference from the ancient 
instance of peccant servility, that whereas in that case 
pardon for it was implored, in the present case a merit 
is made of the sycophancy and the idolatry. Unless 
the principles of Christianity will acknowledge the su- 
premacy of something else than Christianity, in the mode 
of their application to estimate the importance of the 
popular mind, they may take their repose in bodies of 
divinity, sermons, catechisms, systems of ethics, or 
wherever they can find a place. 

But is it really admitted, as a great principle for 
practical application, that the mind, the intelligent, im- 
perishable existence, is the supremely valuable thing in 
man ? It is then admitted, inevitably, that the disci- 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 291 

Dline, the correction, the improvement, the maturation of 
this spiritual being to the highest attainable degree, is 
Jie great object to be desired by men, for themselves 
and one another. That is to say; that knowledge, cul- 
tivation, salutary exercise, wisdom, all that can con- 
duce to the perfection of the mind, form the state in 
which it is due to man's nature that he should be en- 
deavored to be placed. But then, this is due to his 
nature by an absolutely general law. He cannot be so 
circumstanced in the order of society that this shall not 
be due to it. No situation in which the arrangements 
of the world, or say of Providence, may place him, can 
constitute him a specific kind of creature, to which is no 
longer fit and necessary that which is necessary to the 
well-being of man considered generally, as a spiritual, 
immortal nature. The essential law of this nature can- 
not be abrogated by men's being placed in humble and 
narrow circumstances, in which a very large portion of 
their time and exertions are required for mere subsist- 
ence. This accident of a confined situation is no more 
a reason why their minds should not require the best 
attainable cultivation, than would be the circumstance 
that the body in which a man's mind is lodged happens 
to be of smaller dimensions than those of other men. 

That under the disadvantages of this humble situa- 
tion they cannot acquire all the mental improvement, 
desirable for the perfection of their intelligent nature, 
that the situation renders it impracticable, is quite 
another matter. So far as this inhibition is real and 
absolute, that is, so far as it must remain after the best 
exertion of human wisdom and means in their favor, it 
must be submitted to as one of the infelicities of their 
allotment by Providence. What we are insisting on is, 
that since by the law of their nature there is to them 
the same general necessity as to any other human 



292 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

beings, of that which is essential to the well-being ol 
the mind, they should be advanced in this improvement 
as far as they can ; that is, as far as a wise and benev- 
olent disposition of the community can make it practi- 
cable for them to be advanced. 

It is an odious hypocrisy to talk of the narrow lim- 
its to this advancement as an ordination of Providence, 
when a well-ordered constitution and management of 
the community might enlarge those limits. At least it 
is so in the justifiers of that social system : those who 
deplore and condemn it may properly speak of the 
appointment of Providence, but in another sense; as 
they would speak of the dispensations of Providence 
in consolation to a man iniquitously imprisoned or im- 
poverished. 

Let the people then be advanced in the improvement 
of their rational nature as far as they can. A greater 
degree of this progress will be more for their welfare 
than a less. This might be shown in forms of illustra- 
tion easily conceived, and as easily vindicated from the 
imputation of extravagance, by instances which every 
observer may have met with in real life. A poor man, 
cultivated in a small degree, has acquired a few just 
ideas of an important subject, which lies out of the 
scope of his daily employments for subsistence. Be 
that subject what it may, if those ideas are of any use 
to him, by what principle would one idea more, or two, 
or twenty, be of no use to him ? Of no use !- — when 
all the thinking world knows, that every additional 
clear idea of a subject is valuable by a ratio of pro- 
gress greater than that of the mere numerical increase, 
and that by a large addition of ideas a man triples the 
value of those with which he began. He has read a 
small meagre tract on the subject, or perhaps only an 
article in a magazine, or an essay in the literary column 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 293 

of a provincial newspaper. Where would be the harm, 
on supposition he can fairly afford the time, in conse- 
quence of husbanding it for this very purpose, of his 
reading a well-written concise book, which would give 
him a clear, comprehensive view of the subject ? 

But perhaps another branch of the tree of knowl- 
edge bends its fruit temptingly to his hand. And if 
he should indulge, and gain a tolerably clear notion of 
one more interesting subject, (still punctually regardful 
of the duties of his ordinary vocation,) where, we say 
again, is the harm ? Converse with him ; observe his 
conduct ; compare him with the wretched clown in a 
neighboring dwelling ; and say that he is the worse 
for having thus much of the provision for a mental sub- 
sistence. But if thus much has contributed greatly to 
his advantage, why should he be interdicted still fur- 
ther attainments? Are you alarmed for him, if he 
will needs go the length of acquiring some knowledge 
of geography, the solar system, and the history of his 
own country and of the ancient world ?* Let him pro- 
ceed ; supply him gratuitously with some of the best 
books on these subjects ; and if you shall converse with 
him again, after another year or two of his progress, 
and compare him once more with the ignorant, stunted, 
cankered beings in his vicinity, you will see whether 
there be anything essentially at variance between his 

* These denominations of knowledge, so strange as they will 
to some person? appear, in such a connection, we have ventured 
to write from observing that they stand in the schemes of ele- 
mentary instruction in the Missionary schools for the children of 
the natives of Bengal. But of course we are to acknowledge, 
that the vigorous, high-toned spirits of those Asiatic idolaters are 
adapted to receive a much superior style of cultivation to any of 
which the feeble progeny of England can be supposed to be 
capable. 



294 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

narrow circumstances in life and his mental enlarge- 
ment. 

You are willing, perhaps, that he should know a few 
facts of ancient times, and can, though with hesitation, 
trust him with some such slight stories as Goldsmith's 
Histories of Greece and Rome. But if he should then 
by some means find his way into such a work as that 
of Rollin, (of moral and instructive tendency, however 
defective otherwise,) or betray that he covets an ac- 
quaintance with those of Gillies, or even Thirlwall, — 
it is all over with him for being a useful member of 
society in his humble situation. You would consent 
(may we suppose ?) to his reading a slender abridg- 
ment of voyages and travels ; but what is to become 
of him if nothing less will content him than the whole- 
length story of Captain Cook ? He will direct, it is to 
be hoped, some of his best attention to the supreme 
subject of religion. And you would quite approve of 
his perusing some useful tracts, some manuals of piety, 
some commentary on a catechism, some volume of seri- 
ous, plain discourses ; but he is absolutely undone if his 
ambition should rise at length to Barrow, or Howe, or 
Jeremy Taylor.* He is by all means, you say, to be 

* It should be unnecessary to observe, that the object in cit- 
ing any names in this paragraph was, to give a somewhat definite 
cast to the description of the supposed progress of the plebeian 
self-instructor. The principal of them are mentioned simply as 
being of such note in their departments, that he would be likely 
to hear of them among the first of the authors to be sought, if he 
were aspiring to something beyond his previously humble and 
abridged reading. The reader may substitute for these names any 
others, of the superior order, that he may think more proper to 
stand in their place. It would therefore be animadversion or ridi- 
cule misspent, to make the charge of extravagance on this imagin- 
ed course of a plain man's reading, with a specific reference to the 
authors here named, as if it had been meant that precisely these, 



ON TOPULAR IGNORANCE. 29. r > 

kept out of all such pernicious company, in which it is 
impossible he can learn any lesson but one, — an aver- 
sion to good morals, just laws, virtuous kings, a pol- 
ished and benevolent gentry, and learned and pious 
teachers. Well; let him be kept as far as possible 
from the mischief of all such books and knowledge ; 
let him hardly know that there was an ancient world, 
or that there are on the globe such regions and won- 
ders as travellers have described ; or that a reason and 
eloquence above the pitch of some plain homily ever 
illustrated and enforced religion. Let him keep clear 
of all such evil communications; and then, (since we 
were expressly making it a condition, that he can fairly 
spare the time for such reading from his common em- 
ployment,) and then, — he will have just so much the 
more time for needless sleep, for discussing the trifles 
and characters of the neighborhood, or, (supposing 
him still of a religious habit,) for tiring his friends and 
family with the well-meant but very unattractive itera- 
tion of a few serious phrases and remarks, of which 
they will have long since learnt to anticipate the last 
word from hearing the first. Advantages like these he 
certainly may enjoy in consequence of his preclusion 
from the higher and wider field of ideas. But how- 
ever valuable these may be in themselves, they will not 
ensure his being better qualified for the common busi- 
ness and proprieties of his station, than another man in 
the same sphere of life whose mind has acquired that 
larger reach which we are describing. It is no more 
than what we have repeatedly seen exemplified, when 
we represent this transgressor into the prohibited field 
as probably acquitting himself with exemplary regular- 

by a peculiar selection, were to be the authors he may be sup- 
posed to peruse, and in perusing, to waste his time and destroy 
his sense of duty. 



296 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

4 

ity and industry in his allotted labors, and even in this 
very capacity preferred by the men of business to the 
illiterate tools in his neighborhood ; nay, most likely 
preferred, in the more technical sense of the word, to 
the honorable, but often sufficiently vexatious office 
of directing and superintending the operations of those 
tools. 

And where, now, is the evil he is incurring or caus- 
ing, during this progress of violating, step after step, 
the circumscription by which the aristocratic compasses 
were again and again, with small reluctant extensions 
to successive greater distances, defining the scope of 
the knowledge proper for a man of his condition ? It 
is a bad thing, is it, that he has a multiplicity of ideas 
to relieve the tsedium incident to the sameness of his 
course of life ; that, with many things which had else 
been but mere insignificant facts, or plain dry notions 
and principles, he has a variety of interesting associa- 
tions ; like woodbines and roses wreathing round the 
otherwise bare, ungraceful forms of erect stones or 
withered trees ; that the world is an interpreted and 
intelligible volume before his eyes; that he has a 
power of applying himself to think of what it becomes 
at any time necessary for him to understand ? Is it a 
judgment upon him for his temerity, in " seeking and 
intermeddling with wisdom" with which he had no 
business, that he has so much to impart to his children 
as they are growing up, and that if some of them are 
already come to maturity, they know not where to find 
a man to respect more than their father ? Or if he 
takes a part in the converse and devotional exercises 
of religious society, is no one there the better for the 
clearness and the plenitude of his thoughts and the 
propriety of his expression ? — But there would be no 
end of the preposterous suppositions fairly attachable 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 297 

to the notion, that the mental improvement of the 
common people has some proper limit of arbitrary- 
prescription, on the ground simply of their being the 
common people, and quite distinct from the restriction 
which their circumstances may invincibly impose on 
their ability. 

Taken in this latter view, we acknowledge that their 
condition would be a subject for most melancholy con- 
templation, — if we did not hope for better times. The 
benevolent reflector, when sometimes led to survey in 
thought the endless myriads of beings with minds 
within the circuit of a country like this, will have a 
momentary vision of them as they would be if all im- 
proved to the highest mental condition to which it is 
naturally possible for them to be exalted a magnificent 
spectacle ; but it instantly fades and vanishes. And the 
sense is so powerfully upon him of the unchangeable 
economy of the world, which, even if the fairest visions 
of the millennium itself were realized, would still ren- 
der such a thing actually impossible, that he hardly 
regrets the bright scene was but a beautiful mirage, and 
melts away. His imagination then descends to view 
this immense tribe of rational beings in another, and 
comoaratively moderate state of the cultivation of their 
faculties, a state not one-third part so lofty as that in 
which he had beheld all the individuals improved to 
the utmost of their natural capacity ; and he thinks, 
that the condition of man's abode on earth might ad- 
mit of their being raised to this elevation. But he 
soon sees that, till a mighty change shall come on the 
management of the affairs of nations, this too is impos- 
sible ; and with regret he sees even this inferior ideal 
spectacle pass away, to rest on an age in distant pros- 
pect. At last he takes his imaginary stand on what 
he feels to be a very low level of the supposed im- 



'298 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

provement of the general popular mind ; and he says, 
Thus much, at the least, should be a possibility allowed 
by the circumstances of the people under any tolerable 
disposition of national interests ; — and then he turns to 
look down on an actual condition in which care, and 
toil, and distress, render it impossible for a great pro- 
portion of the people to reach, or even approach, this 
his last and lowest conception of what the state of their 
minds ought to be. 

In spite of all the optimists, it is a grievous reflec- 
sion, after the race has had on earth so many thousands 
of years for attaining its most advantageous condition 
there, that all the experience, the philosophy, the 
science, the art, the power acquired by mind over 
matter, — that all the contributions of all departed and 
all present spirits and bodies, yes, and all religion too, 
should have come but to this ; — to this, that in what 
is self-adulated as the most favored and improved na- 
tion of all terrestrial space and time, a vast proportion 
of the people are found in a condition which confines 
them, with all the rigor of necessity, to a mere child- 
hood of intelligent existence, without its innocence. 

But at the very same time, and while the compassion 
rises, at such a view, there comes in on the other hand 
the reflection, that even in the actual state of things, 
there are a considerable number of the people who 
might acquire a valuable share of improvement which 
they do not. Great numbers of them, grown up, waste 
by choice, and multitudes of children waste through 
utter neglect, a large quantity of precious time which 
their narrow circumstances still leave free from the 
iron dominion of necessity. And they will waste it, 
it is certain that they will, till education shall have 
become general, and much more vigorous in discipline. 
If through a miracle there were to come down on this 



ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 299 

country, with a sudden, delightful affluence of temporal 
melioration, resembling the vernal transformation from 
the dreariness of winter, a universal prosperity, so that 
all should be placed in comparative ease and plenty, 
it would require another miracle to prevent this be- 
nignity of heaven from turning to a dreadful mischief. 
What would the great tribe of the uneducated people 
do with the half of their time, which we will suppose 
that such a state would give to their voluntary disposal ? 
Every one can answer infallibly, that the far greater 
number of them would consume it in idleness, vanity, 
or every sort of intemperance. Educate them, then, 
bring them under a grand process of intellectual and 
moral reformation ; — or, in all circumstances and events, 
calamitous or prosperous, they are still a race made in 
vain! 

In taking leave of the subject, we wish to express, 
in strong terms, the applause and felicitations due to 
those excellent individuals, found here and there, who 
in very humble circumstances, and perhaps with very 
little advantage of education in their youth, have been 
excited to a strenuous, continued exertion for the im- 
provement of their minds ; and thus have made (the 
unfavorable situation considered,) admirable attainments, 
which are verifying to them that "knowledge is power," 
over rich resources for their own enjoyment, and are in 
many instances passing with inestimable worth into the 
instruction of their families, and a variety of usefulness 
within their sphere. They have nobly struggled with 
their threatened destiny, and have overcome it. When 
they think, with regret, how confined, after all, is their 
portion of knowledge, as compared with the possessions 
of those whq have had from their infancy all facilities 
and the amplest time for its acquirement, let them be 



300 ON POPULAR IGNORANCE. 

consoled by reflecting, that the value of mental pro- 
gress is not to be measured solely by the quantity of 
knowledge possessed, but partly, and indeed still more, 
in the corrective, invigorating effect produced on the 
mental powers by the resolute exertions made in attain- 
ing it. And therefore, since, under their great disad- 
vantages, it has required a much greater degree of this 
resolute exertion in them to force their way victoriously 
out of ignorance, than it has required in those who have 
had everything in their favor to make a long, free career 
over the field of knowledge, they may be assured they 
possess one greater benefit in proportion to the measure 
of their acquirements. This persistence of a determined 
will to do what has been so difficult to be done, has 
infused a peculiar energy into the exercise of their 
powers ; a valuable compensation, in part, for their 
more limited share of the advantage that one part of 
knowledge becomes more valuable in itself by the ac- 
cession of many others. Let them persevere in this 
worthy self-discipline, appropriate to the introductory 
period of an endless mental life. Let them go on to 
complete the proof how much a mind incited to a high 
purpose may triumph over a depression of its external 
condition ; — but solemnly taking care, that all their im- 
provements may tend to such a result, that at length 
the rigor of their lot and the confinement of mortality 
itself bursting at once from around them, may give 
them to those intellectual revelations, that everlasting 
sunlight of the soul, in which the truly wise will ex- 
pand all their faculties in a happier economy. 

THE END. 



3 47 7 



